Designer at Work

...

2012-01-23T02:48:00.003-07:00

“What kind of idea are you? Are you the kind that compromises, does deals, accommodates itself to society, aims to find a niche, to survive; or are you the cussed, bloody-minded, ramrod-backed type of damnfool notion that would rather break than sway with the breeze? – The kind that will almost certainly, ninety-nine times out of hundred, be smashed to bits; but, the hundredth time, will change the world.”

~Rushdie in The Satanic Verses

Why Loiter? Women & Risk on Mumbai Streets

2012-01-16T23:08:00.004-07:00

The book Why Loiter? Women & Risk on Mumbai Streets aims to map the exclusions and negotiations that females of various age groups and economic classes encounter in their everyday lives in urban spaces in the city of Mumbai. Authors trio, Shilpa Phadke, Sameera Khan and Shilpa Ranade have based this book on their 3 years of qualitative research and conclude that women’s presence and participation in public spaces and events has certainly increased but reserve that the city still does not offer equal claim into the realm of public safety in urban streets and spaces.

Why Loiter? Women & Risk on Mumbai Streets embarks on a significant journey on how a radically transforming city with respect to infrastructure and rapid construction, still continues to grant women only a status of secondary citizen by denying them complete safety at any time of the day. Provision of safety in urban spaces encompasses different understanding for women belonging to different economic classes. Woman travelling in a private vehicle from destination A to destination B has different safety level offered than another woman travelling from same destination A to B in a public transport.

As presented in the book, low visibility areas, poorly lit spaces, deserted streets and public transportation after sunset all consitute for unsafe environments. To counter, women alter their movement and restrict accessing urban spaces, maintaining a compromise. The book presents scenarios where this aspect of women in public spaces is so deeply entrenched that it becomes their second nature to modify their behavior. Examples like covering their chest with a book, file or dupatta, walking while gazing down and pretending to be on the phone while moving swiftly away into private spaces are common glimpses.

What is curious about the book is that investigates various economic and communal settings and how each is unique in providing different degree of freedom and social constraints. So a city, essentially an amalgam of various faiths and religion and cosmoplitan in its claim, provides a different level of freedom in varied communities. And women are not let loose from the clutches of moral policing in the name of safety. She can be letched, eve-teased, groped, stared and made to feel voilated, possibly anywhere. On the other hand, the same does not apply for men, as the authors point out. Men move about and expand their access to urban spaces more vigorously and more importantly any time of the day. Thus enabling more choices with respect to jobs they take up or engage in various social gestures.

This book presents scenarios of Mumbai’s changing landscape and how this emerging urban fabric could be flawed from equitable development and equal access to all citizens. And this is where I see authors blurring issues of gender humiliation to urban development. The two are distinct issues and a very organic development devoid of zoning has not been a solution either, as suggested by the researchers. Women’s safety in a city is not an unique Indian issue. Its rampant here could be a case of cultural baggage of gender hierarchy and its related perils.

The Dirty Picture

2011-12-11T08:38:00.012-07:00

She is unapologetic, unabashed through and through and she does things as she wishes to and just laces it with clever one or two liners and you chuckle, giggle and Silk moves on with her next move. She rips apart all the layers of systematic Indian hypocrisy and quite mercilessly so. And why not, she has learned her lessons very early of this hypocrisy and its vacuousness that Indians proudly swear by. She has learned watching through that key hole that a man can manage to move on from one woman to another quickly and duplicity comes to him naturally. She knows, if she followed the same behavior, she will be labeled loose, lewd and lustful. Guess what, she doesn't care or at least that is what she projects.

The Indian system which puts such a premium on a girl to be 'morally good' one who cares for her modesty and fall in the system's expectation, one of marriage followed by babies or else she falls short of some God forsaken womanhood. And, so even in her rebellious avatar, Silk, ends her life in bridal clothes. One she desired or society desired of her is hard to say.

Movie is pacy, replete with clever one liners and it does not dwell on nuances for too long and there isn't anything to whine about. Nothing at all. A montage, accolades worthy.

On a lighter note, will ooh la la be as perky or "bombatt" without Bappi Lahiri's voice? Think about it.

On Steven Pinker's Better Angels of Our Nature

2011-12-07T22:40:00.004-07:00

... despite the fact that there is such a thing as human nature, despite the fact that we have plenty of ugly, violent impulses inside us, it is perfectly possible to set up a world in which those impulses don’t actually emerge as violent behavior. This is because human nature is a complex system, it has many parts, and among them are a faculty of empathy, a faculty of reason, a faculty of self-control.

…change is now infecting the cultures of societies eager to mimic the societies they consider more wealthy, powerful and successful, possessing the ‘normal’ pathologies that go with success, including high levels of everyday violence. The rise in violence in a number of Indian cities has in recent years been spectacular. The South Asian euphoria over the nuclear tests, however short-lived and however limited in geographical spread, can also be read as an example of the same story of brutalisation and necrophilia. It reflects not merely deep feelings of inferiority, masculinity-striving and parity-seeking, but also a certain nihilism and vague, almost free-floating genocidal rage.

Excerpts from an interview on Better Angels of Our Nature and Why Violence Has Declined

The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything by Ken Robinson

2011-10-15T23:13:00.009-07:00

Its difficult to have missed Sir Ken Robinson's talk which is available on TED and perhaps one of the most devoured talk of our time. His wry sense of humor, nailing the ailments of current education system, all laced with his profound understanding on the topic which he talks with ease. One of the recent watch made me impulsively buy his book, The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything.

His book is a fine extension of things he talks about: creativity, education, its manifestation in a system, a system that perhaps has gone wrong in a severe way. And is looking for ways to change, louder than ever: change that he professes, transformation in a revolutionary way rather than just revising a system. And he does it with pure examples of many creative people who rejected the system, found themselves misfit in a system and kept looking for their creative passion till they discovered it. He urges to look away from the current industrialized model of education and find ways which leverages human diversity in a rich way to save ourselves from an impending crisis of severely damaged human ecology.

He emphasizes that culture itself is strict system, a manifestation, a structure to organize ourselves in an earnest attempt to define our identities.

Culture is a system of permissions.

First we create a system of culture, we put certain parameters of behavior, acceptable & non- acceptable ones. And in doing so, we start putting expectations and sub-consciously demand things and indirectly command people to behave in certain ways in a restrictive way. But things do not always behave in a pre-determined or a predictable manner. Life is not linear, in fact it is extremely organic. To deal with unpredictability and non-linearity, we need to be flexible enough to explore alternate creative paths. And thus he rejects uniformity and homogeneity of a systematic pre-approved thinking.

We put such a premium on being approved of, we become reluctant to take risks.

Book is a celebration of his revolutionary thinking which he has formed over a period of time after interacting with several diverse people across the globe, their journey (sometimes a difficult one) to find their passion and being in one's element, their only element which places them in this magical space in mind where they cannot imagine doing anything else. It breaks all the shackles of a system and frees people to follow that inner inkling of heart whatever that talent might be. For example, so many cultures still emphasize and define a women's secondary role in the system, her delusional image of nurturing the humanity, motherhood and a gender which should bring glamor and gloss to the settings. He says,

Women still have an uneasy relationship with power and the traits necessary to be a leader. There is this internalized fear that if we are really powerful, we are going to be considered ruthless or pushy or strident- all those epithets that strike right at our femininity. We are still working at trying to overcome the fear that power and womanliness are mutually exclusive.

Atul Gawande's Coaching a Surgeon: What Makes Top Performer Better?

2011-10-01T08:33:00.004-07:00

Every time you read essays written by Atul Gawande you are on a high, high achieved through his honest and extremely sorted thought process. He brings his perspective as a physician/surgeon but he correlates his learning and understanding quite easily to other professions and disciplines. His latest essay had the same impact, same heady impact. This is not the first time, I have longed to read his books. Below is an excerpt from his aforementioned article:

We care about results in sports, and if we care half as much about results in schools and in hospitals we may reach the same conclusion. Local health systems may need to go the way of the Albemarle school district. We could create coaching programs not only for surgeons but for other doctors, too—internists aiming to sharpen their diagnostic skills, cardiologists aiming to improve their heart-attack outcomes, and all of us who have to figure out ways to use our resources more efficiently. In the past year, I’ve thought nothing of asking my hospital to spend some hundred thousand dollars to upgrade the surgical equipment I use, in the vague hope of giving me finer precision and reducing complications. Avoiding just one major complication saves, on average, fourteen thousand dollars in medical costs—not to mention harm to a human being. So it seems worth it. But the three or four hours I’ve spent with Osteen each month have almost certainly added more to my capabilities than any of this.
Talk about medical progress, and people think about technology. We await every new cancer drug as if it will be our salvation. We dream of personalized genomics, vaccines against heart disease, and the unfathomed efficiencies from information technology. I would never deny the potential value of such breakthroughs. My teen-age son was spared high-risk aortic surgery a couple of years ago by a brief stent procedure that didn’t exist when he was born. But the capabilities of doctors matter every bit as much as the technology. This is true of all professions. What ultimately makes the difference is how well people use technology. We have devoted disastrously little attention to fostering those abilities.

Complaints

2011-09-08T02:31:00.013-07:00

I figure, complaining, is a form of luxury. A privilege, if one wants to label it. Perhaps from our impatience, restlessness and a need to be heard. What if, you did not have access to vent, access to complain, to simply offload and step aside? What would you do?

You turn inwards perhaps, reason in all possible ways and reach within for a solution. Perhaps, complaining is an outwardly, somewhat noisy expression, as I see it.

Turning inwards, in absence of such luxurious mechanism of venting, you struggle more honestly, gain focus with the energy conserved, focus that is geared towards something more.

Think Different

2011-08-24T21:46:00.002-07:00

To Steve Jobs and his Apple Inc., salüt!

José Saramago's All the Names

2011-07-14T23:29:00.010-07:00

...In order to reach it, it might still be necessary to fight the dragon. This one does not have furious, drooling jaws, it does not snort smoke and fire through its nostrils, it does not roar loud as any earthquake, it is simply a waiting, stagnant darkness, thick and silent as the ocean deeps...

Senhor José, the protagonist of All the Names, thinks to himself, a thought flickering on his mind over outcomes of his dark deed, an inexplicable obsession about a woman, who is an absolute stranger to him. Can't say that it's a great book but I could not put it in bad reads altogether, either. There were some portions which I felt were little more than ordinary. May be I need to read some more of his work to appreciate better. Perhaps, all is not lost when you are left with neutrality. Although, there is a quote in the book that made a lot of sense:

After all, we were not born on this earth, only to connect with God.

Delhi Belly

2011-07-07T08:02:00.006-07:00

Next few paragraphs are strictly about Delhi Belly/ Aamir Khan and why it was such a below ordinary effort from otherwise acclaimed minds in Bollywood. If you have really enjoyed the movie, you may not like to read what I have to say. Just close the browser tab and leave.

The movie is replete with fart and number 2 jokes. I get it, but how many times, not the entire 80 minutes. Darn it. Move on man, what else you have got? Nothing really. Weak story line, loose plot, childish screenplay, desperate attempts to make audience laugh. Ceiling collapsing, diamond packet mix-up with stool sample. I get it, the attempt was to fill the scenes with fart noises, display of filthiest toilets. Clever? No. Far from it. A little too desperate to your face but failed attempt in so many ways at so many levels. Unless audience is assumed as a bunch of college kids only who 'loved' 3-Idiots just so much and wanted to take that experience one step ahead. Sure, it would have worked. But it didn't for me. It might be working for a specific target section. And that would be the obvious guess from this effort.

It has become clear to me, once the names are popular like Aamir Khan, anything he packages with his brand name it becomes a hit, irrespective of substance. Yes, comedy movie can be classy too and that is where Delhi Belly failed (so had 3-Idiots) on an epic scale. It is strange that he is the same guy who gave us Taare Zameen Par or Peepli Live for that matter. But again, brains behind both these movies were different than Aamir Khan, he just happened to get all the limelight. He does it with such finesse that people are drowned in his aura of front facing that it makes it appear that it's all his effort. And he is the only man who is lugging the talent van in Bollywood.

Anything You Want

2011-06-30T09:31:00.004-07:00

Anything You Want. A book by Derek Sivers. His first book. It's out there for sale, now, since yesterday, and its already down with 45% discount. Derek's post on Loss is something I have gone back and read multiple times. It's something I have treasured as an online discovery. Very dearly and closely.

Seth Godin on book's brilliance, here.

PS: Derek has also added my name along with others under acknowledgment for providing feedback/critique on the unpublished version of the book. So if you are one of my friends then you might want to jump and buy the book to see my name in there...:).

You don't say

2011-06-08T20:52:00.003-07:00

We are such inward secret creatures, that inwardness the most amazing thing about us, even more amazing than our reason. But we cannot just walk into the cavern and look around. Most of what we think we know about our minds is pseudo-knowledge. We are all such shocking poseurs, so good at inflating the importance of what we think we value.

There's something fishy about describing people's feelings. You try hard to be accurate, but as soon as you start to define such and such a feeling, language lets you down. When we really speak the truth, words are insufficient. But they're important to us, nonetheless, because they are what connects us to thoughts other than those belonging to us.
~Iris Murdoch

Yet we talk, to overcome silences. Fear silences, for the discomfiture it brings us. We find quietude eerie and try and fill it up with words.

Comfortable Activism

2011-05-22T12:10:00.003-07:00

True activism must not be an easy path. Asking uncomfortable questions to the point of extreme discomfort and working with people whose rights have been compromised, infringed and trampled upon appears to be lot more difficult than this new wave of online activism and this rising clique of bored professionals who indulge in concern almost to a point you may just as well cringe as if its their make belief profession bequeathed by 24/7 internet availability and its million flowery offerings in organizing someone's suffering and its existence into their own forced importance. As someone said,

We agreed: it seems improbable that after years, decades, of politics, action, research, we can still be so easily shocked. You know it’s not uncommon to hear activists, while discussing quotidian barbarities - the system’s incredible & everyday sadisms - confessing, almost sheepish, ‘I was actually shocked.’ Embarrassed at the naivety that we’re still stunned...(contd under Thesis on strange surprise )

Himanshu Kumar of VCA shares his experience on this virtual albeit fake activism. You discern.

...

2011-04-09T10:45:00.004-07:00

People who are in love and people who are in love with the idea of love are remarkably different.
No?

Songs of Sapphique

2011-03-11T10:12:00.003-07:00

"I have walked a stair of swords,
I have worn a coat of scars.
I have vowed with hollow words,
I have lied my way to the stars."

From someone who also said,

"Walls have ears.
Doors have eyes.
Trees have voices.
Beasts tell lies.
Beware the rain.
Beware the snow.
Beware the man
You think you know."

Snow

2011-03-06T08:12:00.005-07:00

"How much can we ever know about the love and pain in another heart? How much can we hope to understand those who have suffered deeper anguish, greater deprivation and more crushing disappointments than we ourselves have known?"

*
"There are two kind of men, said Ka, in a didactic voice. The first kind does not fall in love until he's seen how the girl eats a sandwich, how she combs her hair, what sort of nonsense she cares about, why she's angry at her father, and what sort of stories people tell about her. The second type of man -- and I am in this category -- can fall in love with a woman only if he knows next to nothing about her."

**
Both these quotes are from Snow of Pamuk which I haven't read. But quotes were worth scribbling down in that little gray notebook.

Statistics

2011-02-27T11:34:00.008-07:00

Confidence in self is faith/ trust in others. Both intangible, strangely unquantifiable.

No numbers attached to its strength just members of ordinal scale: good, medium, bad. Making room for mind games.

And remain fragile and crushable, for values, justice, fairness remain malleable and not absolutes.

[Just] speaking statistically.

Greed

2011-02-05T08:39:00.004-07:00

If you think you have overcome greed of human kind, then in all likelihood, you haven't dealt with the complying submissive weighing scale.
S-i-g-h!

Dhobi Ghat (Mumbai Diaries)

2011-01-24T09:26:00.014-07:00

Dhobi Ghat encapsulates lives of four individuals, four strikingly different individuals, from four different backgrounds and classes, belonging to four different stages of lives, who manage to merge their hues and intertwine incidences of lives by being in a complex relationship with one complex city, ~~Mumbai~~ Bombay. A city of hope and aspiration but also despondency and dejection.

Kiran Rao's ensemble of background and its presentation is dexterous and full of poetic details. Merging of foreground and background and many treatments of b/w cityscapes, moldy buildings, its worn-out people, complex choices, bumpy lives, personal and private moves is intelligent. Yet, somehow when the characters takeover and she begins her storytelling, something goes, may be not awry but perhaps missing the zing or brilliance that could have been. Whole movie experience gives you disparate moments to relish and you linger on to certain details and cleverness behind for a little bit longer. But overall you feel disconnected and detached or always trying too hard to anchor into most characters turmoil except for Yasmin (Kriti Malhotra), an enthusiastic chirpy Muslim girl originally from UP now married to a man in Mumbai. Her trailing enthusiasm towards love, married life and small excitements of life brings her to a drastic finality. And you wonder how quietly a city engulfs a life even if its the end. And Arun (played by Aamir Khan), a recluse and a pensive painter while he gets his mannerisms of a painter quite well. He looks away if the conversation is not of his interest. He gazes at city deeply. He looks at objects for details, touches and feels them with fingers for texture to know more. He is finicky enough to use the same mug for his coffee every-time at home. Yet, when he opens his mouth, you beg God to stop him, whatever it may take to do that and you are willing to pay for it. His speaking mannerisms are abrupt and perhaps make it worse since he delivers his words in English. Awkward. Something horrifically amusing and reminds me of another disastrous effort by Hrithik Roshan in Kites. It was to, omg, stop! effect. But then that movie itself was a disaster in totality. This perhaps can be attributed to years of training them as Bollywood mold of larger than life 'superstars', where characters don't play them, they play the characters.

To conclude, Dhobi Ghat gives you several special moments to cherish, things to smile about despite its multitude cliches on Mumbai rains or romanticizing its underbelly. Its pleasurable to watch Munna (charmingly played by Prateik Babbar), and voyeuristic pleasures provided through Shai. She tells us through her character that no matter how uber cool and detached we pretend to be in public but we all still harbor this private intrusive life even if it means just speaking mild lies or intrude privately but obsessively, delving into gray areas about someone if that someone is of interest. Dhobi Ghat is about savoring these divergent vignettes, merging of characters and their habitats but regretfully its not that comes out as one cohesive experience.

Laughter(stock)

2011-01-19T22:28:00.004-07:00

Perhaps, when fleeting laughter quietens,
enduring smiles make their way.

....

2011-01-16T22:44:00.002-07:00

It was to this personal India, and not the India of independence and its great names, that I went when the time came. I was full of nerves. But nothing had prepared me for the dereliction I saw. No other country I knew had so many layers of wretchedness, and few countries were as populous. I felt I was in a continent where, separate from the rest of the world, a mysterious calamity had occurred. Yet what was so overwhelming to me, so much in the foreground, was not to be found in the modern-day writing I knew, Indian or English. In one Kipling story an Indian famine was a background to an English romance; but generally in both English and Indian writing the extraordinary distress of India, when acknowledged, was like something given, eternal, something to be read only as background. And there were, as always, those who thought they could find a special spiritual quality in the special Indian distress.

Above is Naipaul in The Writer and India.

If there is a silence, a dullness, a strange sense of calm, it is because the streets are full of people who have made peace with misery and helplessness; the state has banned all other possibilities, and done so with some violence.

And this is Pamuk for Kars in Turkey, while writing Snow and I found a remarkable similarity in the sentiments of both the authors.

Madame Bovary: Gustave Flaubert

2011-01-16T21:50:00.003-07:00

Before the wedding, she had believed herself in love. But not having obtained the happiness that should have resulted from that love, she now fancied that she must have been mistaken. And Emma wondered exactly what was meant in life by words 'bliss', 'passion', 'ecstasy', which had looked so beautiful in books.

From Flaubert's novel: Madame Bovary.

Ambar Se: Raghu Dixit

2011-01-05T07:58:00.001-07:00

Happy to discover Raghu Dixit's music. May be he is already really popular, and I had not heard of him before. He is brilliant. Liked Ambar se and No man will so far. Happy to share here.

Raghu Dixit - 04 -...

Coetzee's Disgrace

2011-01-04T21:25:00.010-07:00

Harder, yet easier too. One gets used to things getting harder; one ceases to be surprised that what used to be as hard as hard can be grows harder yet.

David Lurie in Disgrace, a middle-aged South African professor in Cape Town reflects after multiple disappointments in his own life and circumstantial failures brought upon him by himself. He is resigned towards his life and makes no attempt to resurrect what he loses with a casual affair with a much younger student. He is reckless, we get to know as we are told about his disinterest in his job, towards his personal life and missing passions. He has intellectualized all the events in his life so far. He has been dismissed from his teaching job at the university as a consequence. After which he tries to move away from things, city life, its intricacies and takes refuge at his young daughter's farm. Lucy Lurie. Lucy has chosen a country life. As David reflects his move to his daughter's house,

But he is a father, that is his fate and as a father grows older, he turns more and more- it cannot be helped- towards his daughter. She becomes his second salvation, the bride of his youth reborn.

All is going just like country life, until that day, the event which shakes his calm and gives rise to only, commotion of feelings, of a protective father. His daughter gets assaulted and plundered physically. After which he is not the same and probably never will be. His quiet reflections are always towards the incidence or some aspect of it.

Menstruation, childbirth, violation and its aftermath: blood matters; a woman's burden, woman's preserve.

Not for the first time, he wonders whether women would not be happier living in communities of women, accepting visits from men only when they choose.

And since Lucy decides to choose silence over the event of her violation, he thinks,

They will read that they are being sought for robbery and assault and nothing else. It will dawn on that over the body of the woman silence is being drawn like a blanket.

The book is a quick one, stunning in certain portions, a page-turner with a certain distinct quality of narrative darkness. My gripe with the book: Coetzee skipping more detailing of certain characters, like Melanie Isaac the girl he has an affair with, never makes an appearance in his life and sort of strangely disappears abruptly. And then Petrus, farm neighbor to Lucy. It is subtly hinted that he is a complex character in all its simplicity and might have something to do with the incidence but rarely gets more attention.

Reparation

2010-12-16T20:51:00.002-07:00

When gaps get filled,
surface is created.

Orwell on Mahatma Gandhi

2010-12-10T09:57:00.002-07:00

Of late years it has been the fashion to talk about Gandhi as though he were not only sympathetic to the Western Left-wing movement, but were integrally part of it. Anarchists and pacifists, in particular, have claimed him for their own, noticing only that he was opposed to centralism and State violence and ignoring the other-worldly, anti-humanist tendency of his doctrines. But one should, I think, realize that Gandhi's teachings cannot be squared with the belief that Man is the measure of all things and that our job is to make life worth living on this earth, which is the only earth we have. They make sense only on the assumption that God exists and that the world of solid objects is an illusion to be escaped from. It is worth considering the disciplines which Gandhi imposed on himself and which — though he might not insist on every one of his followers observing every detail — he considered indispensable if one wanted to serve either God or humanity.

Full essay here.

Its refreshing (an old essay, it just resurfaced. I might have shared this here earlier) to see a critical view on Mahatma Gandhi in a world of psued-activists who have found it fashionable to quote him and talk hastily about his philosophy.

...

2010-11-30T00:11:00.004-07:00

Saying 'certainly' without confidence,
or,
having values without conviction,
are both ineffectual.

Design Like You Give a Dump

2010-11-26T22:35:00.002-07:00

Where all that is toxic, is annihilated to green clouds and green thoughts.

Annie Leonard's newest addition, Story of Electronics.

Amusing thought: Imagine, Bill Gates, Gordon Moore and all those honchos taking a nice swim in a pool of same warm toxic water and saying to each other, "how are we gonna get out of that one, man!"

Orhan Pamuk's My Name is Red

2010-11-24T21:49:00.006-07:00

I haven't gone too far with this book yet, thanks to several failed attempt to revive reading it. However, this time, it looks like I will make it and who knows without a failure. Grouses aside, little bit from the book where Pamuk through his narrator in Chapter 'I am called "Butterfly", explains about Style and Signature:

As long as the number of worthless artists motivated by money and fame instead of pleasure of seeing and a belief in their craft increases, we will continue to witness much more vulgarity and greed akin to this preoccupation with 'style' and 'signature'. I made this introduction because this was the way it is done, not because I believed what I said. True ability and talent couldn't be corrupted even by the love of gold or fame. Furthermore, if truth be told, money and gold are inalienable rights of the talented [...]

Detail review shall follow once I finish the book, whenever that may happen. Or so I hope!

As a bonus, to all you handful but wonderful followers of my blog, I would like to pose this quote by Mario Vargas llosa. (See, I can be very kind and generous too, at times).

Prosperity or egalitarianism- you have to choose. I favor freedom, you never achieve real equality anyway. You simply sacrifice prosperity for an illusion.

Wonderwall

2010-10-31T00:14:00.003-07:00

Wonderwall by Ryan Adams remains my most treasured song, probably, in all my lives. The composition gets even more special because it belonged to Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind.

I haven't been able to keep count of how many times I have seen this movie or others in which Kate Winslet has acted. Revolutionary Road, The Holiday, The Life of David Gale, The Reader. She is a bliss, she is magical. Her performances are powerful. Burnt-orange color haired, free spirited Clementine of Eternal Sunshine remains my personal favorite and somewhere in that space also belongs April Wheeler of Revolutionary Road.

In Broken Images

2010-10-24T20:07:00.003-07:00

Happen to read this poem, In Broken Images by Robert Graves. Sharing it here for greater common good. Its about our perceptions and of two or more facets of anything and our penchant to pick and stick to our very own version.

He is quick, thinking in clear images;
I am slow, thinking in broken images.
He becomes dull, trusting to his clear images;
I become sharp, mistrusting my broken images,
Trusting his images, he assumes their relevance;
Mistrusting my images, I question their relevance.
Assuming their relevance, he assumes the fact,
Questioning their relevance, I question the fact.
When the fact fails him, he questions his senses;
When the fact fails me, I approve my senses.
He continues quick and dull in his clear images;
I continue slow and sharp in my broken images.
He in a new confusion of his understanding;
I in a new understanding of my confusion.
~Robert Graves

Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground

2010-10-03T22:21:00.005-07:00

I recently managed to understand what Orhan Pamuk was implying when he said,

It was as if Dostoevsky was whispering into my ear, teaching me secret language of the soul, pulling me into a society of radicals who, though inflamed by dreams of changing the world, were also locked into secret organizations and taken with the pleasures of deceiving others in the name of revolution, damning and degrading those who did not speak their language or share their version.

Above is quoted from Pamuk's views on Notes from Underground in Other Colours and how deeply he was impacted by it and how it was also one of the key readings early in his life to shape and shook his thinking. Pamuk's Other Colours remains one of the most important book that I have read to say, if, I have to be economical with words. Returning to Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground, sample these.

Man has such predilection for systems and abstract deductions that he is ready to distort the truth intentionally, he is ready to deny the evidence of his senses only to justify his logic.

And what is it that civilization softens in us? The only gain of civilization for mankind is the greater capacity for variety of sensations- and absolutely nothing more. Have you noticed that it is the most civilized gentlemen who have been the subtlest slaughterers?

Our choice is usually mistaken from a false view of our advantage.

For if a desire should come into conflict with reason we shall then reason and not desire, because it will be impossible retaining our reason to be senseless in our desires, and in that way knowingly act against reason and desire to injure ourselves.

And finally the notes that struck me the deeply,

You know the direct, legitimate fruit of consciousness is inertia.

All "direct" persons and men of actions are active just because they are stupid and limited. How explain that? I will tell you: in consequence of their limitation they take immediate and secondary causes for primary ones, and in that way persuade themselves more quickly and easily than other people do that they have found an infallible foundation for their activity, and their minds are at ease and that is the chief thing.

George Orwell's 1984

2010-09-19T21:08:00.006-07:00

Much has been written about this classic, 1984 by George Orwell and in all its sanity, justifiably so. I am glad to have it read and honestly it was easy as the book seemed to pace itself and pages turned swiftly and effortlessly. I hope no one misses this book in their lifetime. I was struck with its finesse, right from the beginning, where in opening pages, Winston Smith, the protagonist, contemplates about and pen and yet to be written creamy paper. He goes on to think:

The pen was an archaic instrument, seldom used even for signatures and he had procured one, furtively and with some difficulty, simply because of a feeling that the beautiful creamy paper deserved to be written on with a real nib instead of being scratched with an ink pencil.

To mark the paper was a decisive act.

All he had to do was to transfer to paper the interminable restless monologue that had been running inside his head, literally for years.

But he realized, even in his panic he had not wanted to smudge the creamy paper by shutting the book while the ink was wet.

And what follows in the remaining pages is nothing but similar genius quality. Don't miss it.

Inverted

2010-09-04T21:46:00.002-07:00

With clear sky under your feet,
you will always be head over heels.

Something that works...

2010-08-29T11:30:00.010-07:00

...for those who are working towards to get that perfect waistline. Here is a tested food formula that has worked and can make you feel that universe is working perfectly with you in magical ways to get you what you want, bite by bite. Its simple, quick and delicious. Its a salad. Ingredients like sprouts (moong), onions, cucumbers, de-seeded tomatoes, carrots, beetroots, corns, fresh lemon juice, olive oil and black salt are simple to assemble. Just finely chop all the veggies and toss them altogether with sprouts. Add black salt, lemon juice and a dash of olive oil and add in fresh coriander/cilantro leaves for all the benefits it promises. For the time I have tried this recipe, I can vouch for two things, one it did not make me feel that I made a compromise to a foodie that I have become and two, the results have been sweet and surreal.

Try it. And if this salad works for you too, I prefer cash. I can settle for something less controversial, say, good books. Jokes aside, wheeeeeee for it!

Distant Relations: Orhan Pamuk

2010-08-20T13:22:00.004-07:00

At quitting time, while buses and streetcars as old as Satsat’s clerks rumbled down the avenue, shaking the building to its foundations, Sibel, my intended, would come to visit, and we would make love in my office. Despite her modern outlook and the feminist notions she had brought back from Europe, Sibel’s ideas about secretaries were no different from my mother’s. “Let’s not make love here. It makes me feel like a secretary!” she’d say sometimes. But, as we proceeded to the leather sofa in the office, the real reason for her reserve—that Turkish girls, in those days, were afraid of sex before marriage—became obvious.
Little by little, sophisticated girls from wealthy Westernized families who had spent time in Europe were beginning to break this taboo and sleep with their boyfriends before marriage. Sibel, who occasionally boasted of being one of those “brave” girls, had first slept with me eleven months earlier. But, by this point, she felt that the arrangement had gone on long enough and it was about time we married. I do not want to exaggerate my fiancée’s daring or make light of the sexual oppression of women, because it was only when Sibel saw that my “intentions were serious,” when she was confident that I was “someone who could be trusted”—in other words, when she was absolutely sure that there would, in the end, be a wedding—that she gave herself to me. Believing myself a decent and responsible person, I had every intention of marrying her; but, even if I hadn’t wished to, there was no question of my having a choice now that she had “given me her virginity.” Before long, this burden cast a shadow over the common ground between us, which we were so proud of—the illusion of being “free and modern” (though, of course, we would never have used such words for ourselves), on account of having made love before marriage—and in a way this, too, brought us closer.

Full story, here.

Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide

2010-08-14T10:18:00.015-07:00

To me, The Hungry Tide, came across as a manifesto of complex relationships we human beings form with each other and also with, nature and its fury, as the circumstances unfold. Portrayal of intricacy through each characters ambition seems like Ghosh's proficiency he was born with which he uses with supreme poetic and romantic yet remains somewhat mellow in approach.

The backdrop, a vast archipelago of islands, the Sundarbans. Characters, Piyali Roy mostly referred as Piya, a scientist who hails from Seattle and comes looking in Lusibari (evolved from Lucy's abode) for rare kind of dolphins and not looking for love, at least, that's what she thinks. Kanai Dutt, a Delhi based businessman, who comes to Lusibari at a request by Nilima to fetch a packet written by her husband Nirmal and has been instructed to be given to Kanai only. And finally, Fokir, an illiterate man but who possesses deep unique knowledge of river and wildlife like no one else does. Fokir, rarely, almost never speaks directly to readers, since he only speaks Bengali and his words are often translated to Piya and others and thus to us readers. Yet, he manages to bind you with an emotional and enduring sympathic bond since not many understand his fiercely true soul. He, with his depth of knowledge and integrity to his work, persuade you that being truly adept and deeply involved in your field of work knows no barriers. His impassioned connection to the river, tides, wildlife have a spellbinding impact throughout his presence and even in his absence towards the end of the novel.

Once, during a conversation with Kanai, Fokir tells him, "truly honest people have no fears and have nothing to worry about." And this captures the essence of his character and his superiority over worldly matters and Kanai. who is once described in Nilima, an elderly and experienced woman's words,

"Kanai's problem is that he's always been too clever for his own good. Things have come very easily to him so he doesn't know what world is like for most people." Piya could see that the judgment was both shrewd and accurate but she knew it was not her place to concur. Nilima said, "Just a word of warning, my dear- fond as I am of my nephew, I feel I should tell you that that he's one of those men who liked to think of himself as being irresistible to the other sex."

To Kanai, Fokir once explains his inexplicable bond that he had and still has with his mother. To a nonplussed Kanai, a question like, "where do you see her face?" seems really appropriate. To which Fokir simplistic response says it all.

"He smiled and began to point in every direction. Here, here, everywhere. The phrasing of this was simple to point of being childlike and it seemed to Kanai that he had finally understood why Moyna (Fokir's wife) felt to deeply tied to her husband, despite everything. There was something about him that was utterly unformed, and it was this very quality that drew her to him: She craved it in the same way that a potter's hands might crave the resistance of unshaped clay."

The Hungry Tide has much to be cherished for its words craft and few things that cannot be captured in words, all said and set in a world away from this industrialized world which is again not devoid of multiple layers of human emotions. In his own words, Ghosh tells us, that words are like the winds that blow ripples on the water's surface. The river itself flow beneath, unseen, and unheard.

Outdated

2010-08-13T12:01:00.007-07:00

Not so long ago, a teenager girl threw this below message in a missive, my way with much profundity and I gasped as if each word in it was meant to hurt me. Deeply. I read the message several times over. With each attempt, as I tried to decipher this new language, I felt like an obsolete crazy woman who is unnecessary obsessed with words, complete words, correct sentences and spellings. Buh.
Do people wonder why their results were never ever slutty? It could be that we didn't watch too many muvys. :wink: :wink:

hmm...k......cet resluts wer gud...score ws decent enuff...i think ill get in2 vet college:D....nd... vll go 4 a muvy wid frenz.

Quote unquote

2010-08-08T10:22:00.003-07:00

"Too many women, in too many countries, speak the same language, of silence."

"There is no bigger hoax than the fidelity of a man, married or otherwise."

I cannot recall the sources of either of them but remember them very distinctly. Missed writing down the names, so if you know it, do share it. And another quote, its source I do know:

"The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, suffering, loss and have found a way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen." ~Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

I did finish reading The Hungry Tide and I am hoping to write on the book sometime soon, not the extended review though, mainly because I feel incapable of doing justice to the book. It got really engaging after the half mark. Sigh.

Amitav Ghosh: The Hungry Tide

2010-08-01T09:35:00.005-07:00

Somewhere around half mark of the book, The Hungry Tide by Amitav Ghosh and it occurs to me that for me one long story goes much slower than long book of multiple shorter stories. I do not know why that is. Perhaps, some quirk about myself that I am unaware of. In any case, I am finding that Ghosh's writing is rich in texture created out of subtle texts and interrelated nuances and makes you want to go slowly, ruminating it, savoring it, bit by bit. I cannot say for certain that I will be writing a review later but few lines that I jotted down so far are here, shared:

The true tragedy of a routinely spent life is that its wastefulness does not become apparent till it is too late.

***
We were on the river, heading home, when the wind suddenly started up. Within moments it was on us- it attacked with that peculiar, wilful malevolence that causes people to think of these storms as something other than wholly natural.
***
In my mind's eye I saw them walking these thousands of people who wanted nothing more than to plunge their hands once again in our soft, yielding tide country mud. I saw them coming, young and old, quick and halt, with their lives bundled on their heads, and knew it was of them the Poet had spoken when he said:
"Each slow turn of the world
carries such disinherited ones
to whom neither the past nor
the future belong."

...

2010-07-18T11:20:00.003-07:00

Saajnaa, a noteworthy song from upcoming movie Lamhaa, a breathtaking ensemble of lyrics, voices and all else, all added with a perfection of a measuring spoon, after a long long time. Whole album looks very promising.

04 - Saajnaa.mp3

Sea. Silence. Solitude.

2010-07-05T10:10:00.004-07:00

Sea. Silence. Solitude. Yet, there was something missing in this serenity that he had longed for.

He had watched the vastness, deeply with empty soulless eyes. It was both liberating and enthralling for some reason. He had traveled his gaze as far as those gloomy gray clouds spanned, up to that straight line at the horizon. Multiple thoughts were gushing to his mind beneath that calm façade to seek refuge and a reply. In any event, he wanted to deny both.

He thought, "Isn't it ironical that a moment will arrive when both will collide and clouds will shed all that they held for so long, purging to achieve that lightness? Lightness that will bring freedom, freedom from this chase." Peace was often fragile and transient and simmered underneath, he had come to understand.

A quick wave had approached under his feet making a clean slate of sand urging him to scribble something on it. He resisted, effort-fully. Brackish wind had bothered him as couple of more waves milled around him and slapped his feet leaving remains of sparkling sand crystals on his toes. He had disliked the clingy nature of wet sand. And dry sand had slipped way too quickly every so often.

Previous betrayal had not fatigued him. Ideally, he should have been battered by now. Strangely, he was not. Part of him was damaged. And life's unpleasant truths were all too clear and corrosive. He wasn't as uniquely strong as he often projected himself to be. He was neither excited nor morose about it. Just the fact he knew more clearly, now. Appearance of peace on the surface seemed uncanny.

Musty heaviness in air had come along with this quietude. He hadn't quite enjoyed this bargain, this moist feeling that had settled heavily on skin of his face and hands. Few strands of hair had decided to stick to his temple. He had raised his finger to brush them aside without breaking his gaze from the horizon, as if all the answers were to be found there. And as if finding difficult answers in life were all that easy.

The Thing Around Your Neck: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

2010-06-16T22:25:00.011-07:00

Last month, I reread Adichie's The Thing Around Your Neck and had to make minor adjustments to my previously held perception of the author whom I had mistakenly put in same genre as Jhumpa Lahiri. The similarity seems small now between the two except for that both write immigrants' stories, their bottled tragedies, implicit sufferings and paradoxical anxieties that unfold in pursuit of a seemingly better life in USA albeit with very different methods. While Jhumpa is a pro in creating stories in the form of slow motion, detail by detail, never ending affliction, so much so that you feel gloomy and tortured during and after the end which certainly end but do not get over. That is probably her expertise and she does it with poised dexterity. Ngozi, on the other hand, produces sharp and witty narratives in a powerful story-telling format and you will feel like feeling amused at her sarcasm and subtle humor but you hold it as she brings it out along with profound understanding of cultural nuances and you muster your understanding for a right reaction. Sample this, from one of the stories, On Monday of Last Week in which Kamara, a Nigerian woman who has joined her husband in America takes up a job as a nanny to an upper class family and becomes obsessed with the mother:

She was still holding the phone; it had started to buzz noisily. She touched the PROTECT OUR ANGELS stickers that Neil had recently placed on the cradle, a day after he called, frantic, because he has just seen a photo on the Internet of a child molester who had recently moved to their neighborhood and who looked exactly like the UPS delivery man. Where is Josh? Where is Josh? Neil had asked, as if Josh would have been anywhere else but somewhere in the house. Kamara had hung up feeling sorry for him. She had come to understand that American parenting was a juggling of anxieties, and that it came with having too much food: a sated belly gave Americans time to worry that their child might have a rare disease that they had just read about, made them think they had the right to protect their child from disappointment and want and failure. A sated belly gave Americans the luxury of praising themselves for being good parents, as if caring for one's child were the exception rather than the rule. It used to amuse Kamara, watching women on television talk about how much they loved their children, what sacrifices they made for them. Now, it annoyed her. Now that her periods insisted on coming month after month, she resented those manicured women with their effortlessly conceived babies and their breezy expressions like "healthy parenting."

For those who want to know more about the author, I would recommend her talk on TED which will mesmerize you, that much I am certain: The Danger of Single Story.

In Captain's Defense: MS Dhoni

2010-05-16T11:19:00.012-07:00

If one decides to seek depression these days, the simplest and surest way is to read current Indian media's outburst over Mahendra Singh Dhoni and his team's early departure from Twenty20 International. It's thoughtless, abrasive and if simply put very pedestrian. And with all it's glorious mediocrity, it has managed to demand Dhoni's captaincy out of vengeance. The reaction is quick, rushed and more often than not, with no due diligence and lacks analytical perspective. Allegations are thrown at his competency with unsubstantiated emotions and flashy news items are nothing more than another way to sensationalize the readily marketable commodity, cricket, in a cheapest possible way. So much so that former players have also unleashed, speaking in a manner as though they never played cricket or any other game in their lives. Ever. Most amusing has been from Mohammad Azharuddin, here. Has he forgotten his own dismal performances and many controversies that he was mired in? Get out, toil and till in the sun and develop (or at least try) all the tricks, tactics, stamina and game skills before having a strong opinion. It's different to spit opinions sitting in a nice air-conditioned room and give thousand advices on how things should have been done in that game and those conditions. The silliest (albeit dublew tee efff) comparison I have stumbled across is "Dhoni and co - please take some lessons from Anand on performing on the "big stage" under pressure." quoted verbatim. I almost rested my case here. Almost. This reminds me of an apt reply by Rachel Green of Friends when a doctor calls her Braxton Hicks contractions as mild discomfort. She quips, "no uterus, no opinion."

Update: Found an article by Kunal Pradhan that echoes my sentiments, here. A passage from it, below:

Next was the fairly regular, but usually standalone, players-have-become-too-fat-because-they-make-too-much-money angle. I’ve always loved this one, especially because it comes from pot-bellied former cricketers who haven’t gotten over the fact that they missed the party by a couple of decades but are trying to make it up by random TV appearances which they want to regularise.

Hummus and hiccups

2010-04-12T21:22:00.010-07:00

I have been making hummus at home and to my great surprise it turns out pretty decent and its freshly made at home. So, I make my own hummus. Wish I could make it sound as cool as 'I brew my own beer'. But all would agree that its not quite the same. For the recipe, its not much of a recipe, its pretty much getting all the ingredients, some roasting and blending it all together to a smooth outcome called hummus. You need chickpeas (chole) (soaked overnight and boiled only till its half cooked), sesame seeds (roasted), dried red chillies, salt, garlic (dry roasted) and olive oil. Take them all together and blend it until its rather uniformly smooth and add a tiny drops of olive oil and chilly powder to garnish and its ready to be eaten.

***
Lately, I have pondered about hiccups a bit, the real ones and how meaningless, inappropriate and untimely they can be. They come anytime, anywhere, unannounced. You may be in a formal setting and you may end up hiccoughing relentlessly. There is no explanation and excuse that can make hiccups look discreet and less obnoxious. People turn around and offer that hollow unsympathetic nod since its not coughing which can demand those sympathetic gestures of water and comfort advice. It would be interesting to hear how different people have handled hiccup in public settings and if they have improvised the strategy to deal with it any better.

India: A Wounded Civilization by V.S.Naipaul

2010-03-14T22:05:00.015-07:00

India: A Wounded Civilization is Naipaul's second book in his widely acclaimed Indian trilogy, the other two being, An Area of Darkness and India: A Million Mutinies Now. This book can make any Indian feel devastated through his incisive, unsympathetic and unpretentious portrayal of India, just what it is and why, just by sheer honesty in analysis. This book is not meant for Indians and NRIs who are foolishly sentimental, romantically heady about their esoteric country of million rituals, several religions, customs and its very many fall-outs, and it's perpetual suffering and for those who announce every now and then in an American hippie like proclamation, "I *love* India". And who come to India once in every year or two for cute elephant or manual rickshaw rides. He calls filth, dirt , degraded human life and squalor just what it is. He investigates the facts that despite the Britishers departure several years ago, India has not overcome the confusion, poverty and misery. He says:

The turbulence in India this time hasn't come from foreign invasion or conquest; it has been generated from within. India cannot respond in her old way, by a further retreat into archaism. Her borrowed institutions have worked like borrowed institutions, but archaic India can provide no substitutes for press, parliaments and courts. The crisis of India is not only political or economic. The larger crisis is of wounded old civilization that has at last become aware of its inadequacies and is without the intellectual means to move ahead.

Through simplistic work of R.K. Narayan and Vijay Tendulkar, Naipaul points out how theater and literature of their time did more disservice by portraying placidity in themes and characters, like everything was going alright and "India will go on" with pride in its feudalistic garb and temperament. He points out:

India had depressed Tendulkar especially. He had seen things there that he had never believed existed. But he didn't speak more precisely: it was as though he still felt humiliated by what he had seen. He said only, 'The human relationships. They're so horrible because they are accepted by the victims.' New words, new concerns: and still even for writer like Tendulkar, the discovery of India could be like discovery of a foreign country. He said he had travelled about Bihar by boat, down the Ganges. And it was of serenity that came to him on this river, sacred to Hindus, that he spoke, rather than of the horrors on the bank.

He tries to explore the idea of Indian 'having his being' which is always in the background of other people and the chaos and blankness that is brought about by props of family, clan, caste, sub-castes, languages. He, through the work of Dr. Sudhir Kakar, a psychotherapist, points out that Indians have underdeveloped ego which is an outcome of complex social structure, a derivative of rules, regulations, rituals, taboos. He goes on to say that how religion and religious practices, magical aspirations and animistic though simplistic mode of thinking- institutionalizes a structure, albeit weak in the wake of need for individual observation and judgment and how it leads to purely instinctive life. Per Kakar:

At a time of change, the underdeveloped ego can be a dangerous luxury. Cities grow; people travel out of their ancestral districts; the ties of clan and family are loosened. The need for sharper perception increases; and perception has to become 'an individual rather than a social function'.

Such changes are bound to overthrow individuals from their comfort zone and more so if you are nestled in between security of unexplained rituals, unfounded social expectations. Reminds me of an example, a real while ago, a friend made a sweeping announcement that she would like to immediately move back to India and settle there. But that was not it, she went on to explain her reasoning, 'in US you have to do all the menial work, clean your own rest room, wash your own dishes and clothes. Back in India I can have all the hired help in the form of servants to do all that I don't want to do'. I was amused but mostly disturbed. And figured that sense of tyranny and abuse cannot be dispelled which runs so deep in her assumed superiority. Before I digress too far, want to wrap it up by the portrayal that ensues in this book by opening sentences of the book, India is for me a difficult country. It isn't my home; and yet I cannot reject it or be indifferent to it; I cannot travel for the sights. I am at once too close and too for.

Women's Reservation Bill: India

2010-03-09T12:00:00.005-07:00

I am inundated with celebratory voices about Women's Reservation Bill which got passed today a bill to reserve a third of all seats in the national parliament and state legislatures for women. Some women have tears and hurray and all that jazz. I respect the sentiment of those women but its not something historic and logic driven that will change the status quo merely by women being present there. I see it as more of a or merely a symbolic victory and most likely a political gesture. Well understood and then I question that if reservation is an answer to all that is happening and if it this any solution?

Don't we need excellence in leadership at that level where being male, female, bisexual, homosexual and what have you is of less importance than the work that is required to improve things. As I say this I realize, what about the whole bi's and homo's population representation. But that's for another day. Today let's talk only about women. Reservations and quotas are really for needy people and which so often happens that in India it rarely reaches them. Same issue, I saw in well meaning reservation for SC/ST. But this reservation was mostly enjoyed by privileged middle class, aware folks who had all the resources and money and yet got reservation benefits whereas they should have done things on their merit. Suppressed remained ignoramus and exploited and continue to do so.

If women's representation had to change anything then why hasn't it changed it already? We have had woman prime minister and have a woman president. Paradigm shift and attitude change does not happen merely by placing symbols. Rather by inculcating excellence and implementing result driven schemes and awareness and education and that's neither a man nor a woman's job but a collective conscious team effort. This whole deal sounds more like two female compartments reserved in a Bombay local train. Sorry about the frivolity.

Have a heavy duty scheme which attempts to change the mindset of people that women should not be a victim of social expectations, arbit mores, rules, regulations which all leads to self abuse or external abuse in one way or the other. Lift those restrictions and set them free. Enable them to make their independent choices, wrong or right and then let them learn from them and become a more able person. Have a bottom up approach reach the most neglected and abused section of women. Enable them, give them tools. They will fight for themselves and teach you how to do things better in next step. This top down symbolic gesture for now is for amusement. Only.

Art is very old- Margaret Atwood

2010-02-18T22:11:00.006-07:00

Art must be as old as human existence (I think) and as long as we strive to exist art will too in one form or the other. Be it in temporal celebration of inscrutable happiness or savored permanence of inextricable suffering.

An excerpt from her speech that she would have given at Davos this year:

Like you, I wait with eagerness to see what new sorts of art the younger generations will produce. Whatever astonishing forms or media they invent, they won’t stray far from their age-old themes, which are those of humanity itself: its struggles, its tragedies, its relation to its biological home, its loves and triumphs, and above all, its sense of wonder. I wish for these young artists what I wish for all of us: a cool head in a crisis; a knack for lateral thinking; grace under pressure; and a sackful of good luck. We will need all of them.

Full text on her blog, here.

Update: Happened to brush with some more of Atwood on optimism. Was too clever and timely to not include here.

"Anybody who writes a book is an optimist. First of all, they think they're going to finish it. Second, they think somebody's going to publish it. Third, they think somebody's going to read it. Fourth, they think somebody's going to like it. How optimistic is that?"

Chinese Whispers

2010-02-10T21:20:00.003-07:00

As children we all played Chinese Whispers at some point of our childhood. We huddled and sat in a circle and one person, to begin the game whispered a sentence of his/her choice into the ears of the next person. Then that person whispered the same into the ears of next. The last person in the circle had to speak that sentence loudly converting what it had been a whisper so far. And surprisingly, the final sentence had been modified from the original version. Something like life, where we change from what we had started as through various communications with different people and different stages of life. Each association and communication left us with one of the Ms. We meandered, modified, mollified, mocked, menaced, maneuvered, messed, mended, managed, mangled, manufactured or made peace with it. But somehow, each association with its communication (verbal or not) with another human being or cluster of human beings left us transformed, good or bad. Essentially, we transformed from where we had begun originally with myriad of changes, each time we crossed path with others. Does it mean that we as a race are organically connected clusters? And our every action and deed makes it better or worse not just for ourselves but others as well who may be connected with each of us with one or more degree of separation?

So, how we started as children and then went through series of whispers connections in the form of learning, unlearning and growing up into something we are today and what we will be tomorrow. No?

A cook can cook...

2010-01-26T22:49:00.004-07:00

..as Yan could. Could never understand how he could maintain such cheery facade while doing something as intense as cooking. Because when I cook I am nervous, petulant and focused. I find cooking deeply introspective and have had many realizations cooking many things, ranging from Palak paneer, Baigan bharta, Thai curries, Coconut stew, Mooli Parathas, Banana bread, Kheer, Pastas, Pulav, Sambhars, Steamed modaks, Gulab Jamuns, Masala bhindi and so many more things. I have come to an understanding that yours truly is a very snobbish cook and hardly follow a recipe as is. I like to organize my ingredients in the vicinity (a characteristic of organizing things similar to Jack Nicholson in As good as it gets) and and find chopping onions (finely) to be the most fulfilling task. I need a good knife or things become deeply unsatisfying and annoyance may rise. I do not particularly enjoy people advising me on how it should be done or modify some steps. My ego is most prominent while cooking.

I tried Penne Pasta in mint, basil and garlic sauce with sauteed corn and carrot. It was accompanied with caramalized onions and mushrooms. Whole things was then embellished with roasted peanuts and walnuts. Accompanying picture is not the very best visual illustration but presented nonetheless. If anyone is interested in the recipe, do ask me and would be happy to share and if I am happy at that moment, may invite you over for dinner as well. No. Just messing.

An End to Suffering by Pankaj Mishra

2010-01-26T11:28:00.008-07:00

In middle of Pankaj Mishra's An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World and while not sure about the book's promises yet but realized that he is a stunning writer to be reading. He may sound masochistic at times but remains profound, if nothing more. And that would be an understatement about him. A very brief excerpt from the prologue below:

I had taken to Delhi my provincial ability to be quickly impressed, and a hunger for new adventures, possibilities of growth. In well-protected enclaves, there were libraries and bookshops, cultural sections of foreign embassies, film festivals and book readings. there were even- if you had the money and the confidence- a dozen five-star hotels. But these excitements were temporary- best possessed at a high level of wealth and security, and maintained beyond the first few minutes only if, after the new European film, you were returning in an air-conditioned car to house with high walls. For to emerge into a humid night from the pavement with the limbless beggars; to push and elbow then to watch with a foolish little twinge of privilege the stranded men at the bus stops, was to be robbed of the new and fragile sensations of the previous few hours; it was to have yet again a sense of hollowness of the city's promise and the mean anonymity of the lives it contained; it was to know the city as a setting not of pleasure but of work and struggle.

I guess, I will have a lot more to say about the author and the book when, once I calmly slide the bookmark in between the thin last page and the thick rear cover. More to follow. Hopeful.

Two movies and Shreyas Talpade

2010-01-16T10:05:00.015-07:00

Been meaning to write about two movies that have been on my mind for past few months and after watching both the movies more than once I can assure you that they are worth all your time. They being: Nagesh Kukunoor's Iqbal and Shyam Benegal's Welcome to Sajjanpur. Only common factor between them is Shreyas Talpade (yes, both movies are really that different yet magnificently charming) who imho, is a very fine actor and have a feeling that Bollywood may not be giving him sufficient or right opportunities to exploit his true potential. I admit that it is my biased opinion. May be if Big B and King Khan decided to abandon the B-world there would be less greed from audience to see larger than life portrayals and movies. Trust me, I do not have anything against them but in my limited experience, I never got a sense that they are playing a certain character which is a part of the whole ensemble but it feels the exact opposite, its the character playing them. Something to the effect of: there is this whole movie on one side and there is this big star in it who is playing one major role in it, and that big the disconnect can be(exceptions might apply but haven't been convinced enough). In essence they always end up being larger than the characters they play. The best quip that I have heard about Shahrukh Khan is from Naseeruddin Shah: "I like Shahrukh but not his acting."

Back to Talpade, he played a teenager village boy from a poor family, Iqbal Khan whose grit and determination is only to play cricket and to shine in it as a fast pace bowler. At first, one may argue that one with such dismal background and in addition who is handicapped too (deaf and dumb), any aspiration seems unachievable or rather ambitious. But the way , story unfolds itself, and the way its crafted, it leaves you mesmerized, extremely moved and albeit convinced to a dream that every Indian boy carries (almost all), to play cricket and be part of that blue uniform team. Each role has its significance in the movie and so beautifully played so as to only embellish in such a way that his/her absence will render the ensemble unpolished.

In Welcome to Sajjanpur, Shreyas plays Mahadev Khuswaha, who makes his living, reading and writing letters of uneducated people of his village. And as the story unfolds, it takes many twists and turns and leaves you tickled at times while provoking to think at other times. Movie stays a light comedy throughout and yet manages to deliver some nuanced experiences and raises some deep issues of social fabric.,along the way. Shreyas's simpleton grin is unmatched for. And his personal moral struggle showcases many shades of honesty and dishonesty (sometimes) and his getting past with all that eventually to realize his dream to become a writer is a journey you wouldn't want to miss.

p.s: this post is written in a very haphazard and piecemeal manner so you might find some rubbish sentences and typos, please ignore, I plead.

Mohsin Hamid's Reluctant Fundamentalist

2010-01-10T11:27:00.006-07:00

Browsing through books in library or bookstores can be a fulfilling activity and it can turn out to be bonus delight when you lay your hand on something and end up finishing it right there. Such that it does not linger on your mind later and the memory of it does not haunt you.

Something similar happened with Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist. It's a 200 odd pages book which thankfully I could finish in one sitting in roughly about 3 hours. I found the prose gentle, beautifully sensitive about the inner struggle of a person at places and never felt it whined for longer descriptions. You either relate, sympathize or simply understand the conflicting commotion he might be going through.

The story is about a young Pakistani man Changez and his growing turmoil in adapting to a full-fledged American way. He attends Princeton and goes on to join a prestigious firm where it is slowly leading him to immerse completely in to the American dream of wealth and success. His love affair happens to be with an American girl, Erica. Identity, perception of love in one's culture, turbulence in the process of belonging to your roots become even more intense because all this happens in the background of 9/11 attacks on US.

The sensitivity with which Hamid paints the love (or almost love or lack of) between Changez and Erica is elegant and beautifully sophisticated. His simmering anger over estrangement and victimization of identity that follows is felt throughout the story.

The story is moving and while being sympathetic to the catastrophe that hit America you are also made to see a viewpoint as an outsider from a country which may live in the wrath and growing animosity that would follow. This alternate viewpoint scurries over imperial capitalistic power and its serious repercussions and how it can dilute the sympathy on the other side of the line.

I would have loved to share few quotes from the book which made me move from mere glancing to finishing it but I do not have a copy of it with me but I found few reviews of the book online: here and here.

...

2009-12-18T01:37:00.008-07:00

Saiyyan_Kailash_Kh...

Enjoy! You are welcome.

Had heard Kailash Kher couple of years back but did not pay much attention and regret doing so. His voice is melancholic and sublime too. Above is one such song, but can lose the impact, if not heard correctly. Some more Kailash Kher, here.

Translator's note...

2009-12-09T11:13:00.005-07:00

... Mani Rao, from the Bhagavad Gita. (Link via some lit. list)
and the note in entirety and on fidelity:

Your partner is faithful to you, it is conventional, she is obedient, you can’t complain. Does she love you? What if she had the freedom to betray and nothing to lose?

Your partner is unfaithful. Does she pity you, or think you so stupid you don’t know it? Her attention is elsewhere when you speak. Can you be with someone who is not with you?

Love is problematic when faithless.
Fidelity is a drag when loveless.

Love as translation.
After all these years my love, you dare tell me that you merely did what I said?

Religion and its ways

2009-11-30T20:48:00.030-07:00

No, it was not my hidden intention to "Orhan"ize this space with an overdose but it may seem so after this post as I attempt to make some sense of my own thoughts. So my apology in advance. *Traffic and Religion* is one such essay that stood out in Other Colours: Essays and a Story. It highlighted Pamuk's astute skills at observing environment inside one's mind and surrounding along with understanding and translating that into rationale thereafter. And to quote few passages from the essay:

To obey a NO LEFT TURN sign on a back street when there wasn't another car in sight, waiting for the light to turn green, was to bow down to an authority that made no allowances for the intelligent pragmatist. We had little respect for those who obeyed the letter of the law in those days; people only did that only if they lacked brains, imagination, or character.
---
But as I sat on the edge of this square on the outskirts of Tehran, watching the driver waver between obedience and pragmatism, I could tell that this man, whom I knew well enough by then, had not the slightest interest in making a national statement. His problem was much more mundane: Because we were in a hurry it seemed a waste of time to go all the way around the circle, but he was glancing anxiously at all the other roads that led into it, because he knew that if he rushed the decision he might end up crashing into another car.
---
When I went to visit Tehran and saw the chaos and destruction these drivers brought upon themselves as they fought the highway code with furious ingenuity for the preservation of their autonomy, it seemed to me that their little bursts of lawless individualism were strangely at odds with the state-imposed religious laws that dictate every other aspect of life in the city.
---
Oddly, it's when you're battling your way through the mad traffic, fighting it out with the city's lawless drivers, that you feel the presence of religion most keenly. Here's the state proclaiming that all must bow to the laws laid down in the Holy Book, mercilessly enforcing those laws in the name of national unity and making it clear that to break them is to end up in prison, when meanwhile the city's drivers, knowing the state is watching, flout the highway code and expect everyone else to do likewise; they see the road as a place where they can test the limits of their freedom, their imagination, and their ingenuity. I saw reflections of same contradiction in my meetings with Iranian intellectuals, whose freedoms were so severely restricted by the Sharia laws the state had imposed in the streets, the markets, they city's great avenues, and all other public spaces. With a sincerity I cannot help but admire, they set out to prove they were not living in Hitler's Germany or Stalin's Soviet Union by showing me they could discuss whatever they wanted, wear whatever they liked, and drink as much bootleg alcohol as they pleased in the privacy of their own homes.

***
And this got me thinking about the way various religions organize themselves to offer prayers and wonder if it impacts its people in their thinking and hence their immediate surroundings and community fabric. Consider two examples, Christian and Hindu modes of prayers. They both conjure up very different images in mind. Don't they? One gives a sense of orderliness (in appearance externally at least) while the other chaos. The mode of prayers for Hindus offer freedom of choice and imagination to flourish and hence beliefs in Hindu prayers spill out on the streets, sidewalks, buildings and trees, stones, rocks, rivers and so on. This also baffles me about the existence of innumerable forms of deities and how each region has a slightly varied and modified mode of prayer and offering and related mythological tales associated with God that are shared, each with equal fierceness in beliefs. Can it have to do with the amount of freedom to think one's religion provides? Some Hindus pro-rate their wealth as offerings to God. Bigger the offering, bigger might have been the gains. Other way to look at it is, bigger the offering, bigger his/her expectant share in God's blessings might be.

Coming back to fabric of urbanization, think of ways civic bodies try to control peeing and spitting in the public spaces in Indian cities. One distinct example, is to put posters, tiles or scribblings of God's images on walls, where "Yahan thookna mana hai" (which translates to spitting is not allowed here) warning alone doesn't work. Religious symbols are used to feed fear in followers' mind. Though, this does not explain what excuses us to not provide public restrooms but this combative strategy works rather effectively. No God fearing human being would dare to mess with this system and that explain that how deep that belief (or fear) might be running. If it is blind faith or not, I will skip to say anything on it since I am no expert on this but merely an observer.

One possible explanation that comes to mind to this staunchness could be the degree of suffering. Despite the attempted hogwash of India's emergence as a superpower, large percentage of its citizens live in dismal condition. In such abject condition and state of helplessness, one may only turn to divine help.

One last thought, does one's religion and religious practices liberate his mind or provide basis for unfounded fears? And does this liberation or captivity, as the case may be, affect the way we organize ourselves in public and private spaces. And how does it impact our community and its development that may follow in hierarchy, structure, zoning, segregation of land, spaces and its organization and lastly of course, how do people with particular religion who inhabit such places behave in them?

***
As an aside, I peeked into two new books recently which looked promising. One being Museum of Innocence by Orhan Pamuk and second one which looked mighty intriguing from the few pages that I read was Pankaj Mishra's An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World. I have started reading something thick and fat and if I do get to the last page, I will be delighted and also have stronger biceps and triceps (!) and there is one other place that I am spamming these days, twitter.

Pamuk's Other Colours

2009-11-20T12:57:00.013-07:00

Orhan Pamuk's Other Colours is a collection of his selected writings which brings out a glimpse of his intimate views on family ties, politics, writing, writers, ethos and it's related pathos. Unlike in work of fiction where author talks to readers through portrayal of characters , this takes a dip into author's own mind, his trepidations, feelings, fears, melancholy, arguments. In this plunge you do not come out empty handed. In fact, you gather those precious things generously with both your hands. Just to give a glimpse of this enriching book, I have reproduced two short write-ups below from the collection:

Dead Tired in the Evening

I come home tired in the evenings. Looking straight ahead, at the roads and pavements. Angry about something, hurt, incensed. Through my imagination is still conjuring up beautiful images, even these pass quickly in the film in my head. Time passes. There's nothing. It's already nighttime. Doom and defeat. What's for supper?

The lamp atop the table is lit; next to it sits a bowl of salad and bread, all in the same basket; the tablecoth is checkered. What else? ...A plate and beans. I imagine the beans, but it's not enough. On the table, the same lamp is still burning. Maybe a bit of yogurt? Maybe a bit of life?

What's on television? No, I'm not watching television; it only makes me angry. I'm very angry. I like meatballs too- so where are the meatballs? All of life is here, around this table.

The angels call me to account.

What did you do today, darling?

All my life...I've worked. In the evenings. I've come home. On television- but I am not watching television. I answered the phone a few times, got angry at a few people; then I worked, wrote....I became a man... and also- yes, much obliged- an animal.

What did you do today, darling?

Can't you see? I've got salad in my mouth. My teeth are crumbling in my jaw. My brain is melting from unhappiness and trickling down my throat. Where's the salt, where's the salt, the salt? We're eating our lives away. And a little yogurt too. The brand called Life.

Then I gently reached out my hand, parted the curtains, and in the darkness outside caught sight of the moon. Other worlds are the best consolations. On the moon they were watching television. I finished off with an orange- it was very sweet- and my spirits lifted.

Then I was master of all worlds. You understand what I mean, don't you? I came home in the evening. I came home from all those wars, good bad, and indifferent; I came home in one piece and walked into a warm house. There was a meal waiting for me, and I filled my stomach; the lights were on; I ate my fruit. I even began to think that everything was going to turn out fine.

Then I pressed the button and watched television. By then, you see, I was feeling just fine.

***

Rüya and Us

1. Every morning we go to school together: one eye on the watch, one eye on the bag, the door, the road. In the car, we always do the things: A) wave at the dogs in the little park; B) knock back and forth as the car accelerates around a corner; C) say, "To the right and down the hill, Mr' Driver!" casting a sidelong glance at each other and laughing; D) laughing when we say, "To the right and down the hill Mr.Driver!" because he knows exactly where we're going, as we always take taxis from the same taxi stand; E) get out of the taxi and walk hand in hand.

2. After I have hung her bag on her shoulder, kissed her, and led her into school, I watch her from behind. I have memorized the way Rüya walks, and I love watching her walk into school. I know she knows I'm watching her. It is as if her knowing I'm watching makes us both feel secure. First, there is a world she enters and explores every day, and then there is the world we two share. When I watch her, and she turns, and she turns around to watch me, we keep our world going. But then she breaks into a run and enters a new life where my eyes cannot go.

3. Let me brag a little: My daughter is intelligent and knows what she likes. She insists without a moment's hesitation that I tell the best stories, and on weekend mornings she lies down next to me and demands her due. Because she knows who she is, she knows what she wants. "It should be witch again, she should escape from prison but she shouldn't go blind and she shouldn't grow old, and in the end she shouldn't catch the little child." She doesn't want me skipping the parts she likes. She tells me which parts she doesn't like while I'm still telling the story. This is why telling her a story means both writing it and reading it as the child who wrote it.

4. As with all intimate relationships, ours is a power struggle. Who will decide: A) which channel to watch on television; B) what time is bedtime; C) what game will be played or not played, and how this decision, and many other similar decisions, discussions, disputes, tricks, sweet deceptions, bouts of tears, rebukes, sulks, reconciliations, and acts of contrition will be resolved after long political negotiations. All this effort makes us tired and happy, but in the end it accumulates and becomes the history of the relationship, the friendship. You come to understanding, because you're not going to give up on each other. You think about each other, and when you're parted you remember each other's smell. When she is gone I miss the smell of her hair terribly. When I'm gone, she smells my pajamas.

***

This book is worth glancing and sipping in bits next time you are at the nearest bookstore. For me it had turned into an impulse purchase after twenty minutes. Although, now, after finishing the book, I don't regret it and guilt laden self is riding on a backseat.

Today's Labor Camp

2009-11-10T09:14:00.008-07:00

We would like to believe that we made slavery, a thing of past and in this talk below Cameron Sinclair of Architecture for Humanity shatters that very myth as he brings out the reality of who pays the actual price of accelerated "development". and not exactly the consumer at the end of the cycle. As poignant as it can get, he brings up something very critical, ethical footprint.

While we are still around UAE and it's recent rapid construction boom, Johann Hari brings out the suffering human element side of it in The Dark Side of Dubai. It's intensely troubling and the gloom and the doom in it are sure to break your heart, if at all. Snippet from the article below:

Sonapur is a rubble-strewn patchwork of miles and miles of identical concrete buildings. Some 300,000 men live piled up here, in a place whose name in Hindi means "City of Gold". In the first camp I stop at – riven with the smell of sewage and sweat – the men huddle around, eager to tell someone, anyone, what is happening to them.

Sahinal Monir, a slim 24-year-old from the deltas of Bangladesh. "To get you here, they tell you Dubai is heaven. Then you get here and realise it is hell," he says. Four years ago, an employment agent arrived in Sahinal's village in Southern Bangladesh. He told the men of the village that there was a place where they could earn 40,000 takka a month (£400) just for working nine-to-five on construction projects. It was a place where they would be given great accommodation, great food, and treated well. All they had to do was pay an up-front fee of 220,000 takka (£2,300) for the work visa – a fee they'd pay off in the first six months, easy. So Sahinal sold his family land, and took out a loan from the local lender, to head to this paradise.

As soon as he arrived at Dubai airport, his passport was taken from him by his construction company. He has not seen it since. He was told brusquely that from now on he would be working 14-hour days in the desert heat – where western tourists are advised not to stay outside for even five minutes in summer, when it hits 55 degrees – for 500 dirhams a month (£90), less than a quarter of the wage he was promised. If you don't like it, the company told him, go home. "But how can I go home? You have my passport, and I have no money for the ticket," he said. "Well, then you'd better get to work," they replied.

Sahinal was in a panic. His family back home – his son, daughter, wife and parents – were waiting for money, excited that their boy had finally made it. But he was going to have to work for more than two years just to pay for the cost of getting here – and all to earn less than he did in Bangladesh.

He shows me his room. It is a tiny, poky, concrete cell with triple-decker bunk-beds, where he lives with 11 other men. All his belongings are piled onto his bunk: three shirts, a spare pair of trousers, and a cellphone. The room stinks, because the lavatories in the corner of the camp – holes in the ground – are backed up with excrement and clouds of black flies. There is no air conditioning or fans, so the heat is "unbearable. You cannot sleep. All you do is sweat and scratch all night." At the height of summer, people sleep on the floor, on the roof, anywhere where they can pray for a moment of breeze.

The water delivered to the camp in huge white containers isn't properly desalinated: it tastes of salt. "It makes us sick, but we have nothing else to drink," he says.

The work is "the worst in the world," he says. "You have to carry 50kg bricks and blocks of cement in the worst heat imaginable ... This heat – it is like nothing else. You sweat so much you can't pee, not for days or weeks. It's like all the liquid comes out through your skin and you stink. You become dizzy and sick but you aren't allowed to stop, except for an hour in the afternoon. You know if you drop anything or slip, you could die. If you take time off sick, your wages are docked, and you are trapped here even longer."

He is currently working on the 67th floor of a shiny new tower, where he builds upwards, into the sky, into the heat. He doesn't know its name. In his four years here, he has never seen the Dubai of tourist-fame, except as he constructs it floor-by-floor.

Is he angry? He is quiet for a long time. "Here, nobody shows their anger. You can't. You get put in jail for a long time, then deported." Last year, some workers went on strike after they were not given their wages for four months. The Dubai police surrounded their camps with razor-wire and water-cannons and blasted them out and back to work.

Three hundred crores

2009-11-03T23:00:00.011-07:00

Three hundred crores is plainly a very huge amount to be in question for lunatic ventures of MNS. I can now, conveniently say MNS is more of an eclipse to the city, it's people and most of all to the well-being of people of Maharashtra but who am I to say? Such act of cowardice and dementia cannot be now passed as politically driven, vote bank safety motivations when people are seriously suffering. Suffering for the need of basic needs, clean water & air, shelter, health care and I am not even talking about upgraded amenities of public libraries, public parks, community centers, old-age homes but who am I to say?

I am beginning to abhor my little knowledge of language Marathi which I learned during my schooling years when I chose it over French which was not out of compulsion but by choice.

There comes a time in any tyrannical period when people figure they have suffered enough and said leaders have mooched them off their rights of every kind is that then they bring about a revolution. They take over the reins in their own hands and crush the oppressors to nothingness. Bombay awaits for such a revolution from its people. Yes, as for my meaningless rebel I am not going to use Mumbai for Bombay, anymore.

Racism within us

2009-10-28T02:08:00.003-07:00

Been reflecting on this for past few days and more so after Amit Varma of India Uncut verbalized the passive racism that may go on in Indian male head towards women of different races and their own. He says:

The ministry says it is doing this because it doesn’t want anyone to “show Nehru in a poor light.” That is bizarre: I don’t think his alleged affair with Edwina shows him in a poor light—the guy was human, after all. (Most Indian men would probably think more highly of him because he scored with a white chick, but leave that aside.)

And I couldn't leave that aside and would like to pose this question here. I would like to know Indian male readers perspective on this aspect. Come to think of it, I welcome female readers thoughts as well. If you are not comfortable casting your views along with identity attached then go anonymous, I will respect it. I do have my own set of observations on this and will share it here later.

Colorless Images

2009-10-02T04:12:00.010-07:00

Singapore downtown

Do colors (or lack of them) in images evoke emotions differently or rather evoke different emotions? I have one with colors next to it and looking at both of them together, I feel they communicate singularly, with different paces and visual noises. Been a massive fan of b/w pictures and have always ended up fidgeting with colors in them and personally feel that they upgrade the picture viewing experience and it so happens that with colors they do not speak to me the same way. Absence of colors, leave the viewers to paint and fill colors per their imagination or leave it, as is. That's always joyous! There is room for romancing with the image and imagination and things are always more charming in web of imagination with two steps of distance.

Gym log

2009-09-22T06:17:00.004-07:00

After much persistence, things have started looking better with gym visits. Run time has improved drastically and it has resulted in much niceness. If anyone cares, here is my little log of what it looks like so far:

Week of 7th September
Running/Jogging 4.25 miles (55 min.)
Cycling 5 miles (20 min.)
Cross training, climbing (10 min.)
Rowing, 25 cal. burn (15 min.)

Week of 14th September
Running/Jogging 4.75 miles (60 min.)
Cycling 4.5 miles (20 min.)
Cross training, climbing 1 mile (15 min.)
Rowing, 30 cal. burn (15 min.)

And, and, week of 21st September
Running 5.25 miles (65 min.)
Cross training, 1.5 miles (25 min.)
Abs crunches (20 min.)
Yoga (10 min.)

This is generally, 5 times a week now. And it has started to feel really strange (depressed would be more appropriate a word) if I miss a visit. Needless to say, I love running the most amongst everything when its coupled with good music. I think, if I could, I can do this forever, just like reading, without a break, till I am reduced to just bones, perhaps. I am at most peace while I am on treadmill, there is certain sense of clear thinking when I am on the go. To arrive and cross 5 miler wasn't easy. There were blocks, both mental and otherwise. It took time and efforts and I am happy nevertheless. I am starting to wonder if I can dream of half-marathon. May be, not a good idea to take big leaps in hope!

Cleared...

2009-09-12T02:12:00.009-07:00

...just some dust from my ipod (figuratively as well) and discovered an old beautiful song, in my collection. As I recall, it was a one time wonder by a group called 'Partners in Rhyme'. Their glory faded with time. Although, it left an impressionable mark to those it mattered. It did.

It brought back few things that I had missed within me probably sorely. My quieter reflective self where I do not feel the need to talk in words to prove my physical presence and how much I cherish my solitude which is so different from loneliness. Often the two, mixed and misunderstood.

I love the serenity, quietude, pensive, distant closeness, inexplicable bonding and ethereal companionship to stars and dark bluish gray sky feel in the song. Perhaps, something similar to the mixed feelings gushed through while sitting by the window of a plane, in the night time, before it takes off to traverse over an ocean to reach another country?

Chandni rate.mp3

A new low on democracy

2009-08-24T11:09:00.002-07:00

The recent ruckus created by BJP over Jaswant Singh's book: Jinnah: India, Partition, Independence is not merely symbolic sensationalism but it's a showcase of many deeper failings that the party has chosen and tried to undermine independent thinking voices. A fine article by Siddharth Varadarajan in The Hindu, here.

The Jaswant Singh affair is first and foremost an oracle for the atrocious state of affairs in the BJP but it also forces us to ask: Can Indian democracy survive without the freedom to think and write? Can it flourish without the right to question and interrogate received wisdom? Can it be vibrant without being able to take irony, humour, irreverence and even a bit of disrespect in its stride? The individual fate of Mr. Singh need not detain us here but the manner and basis for his expulsion will further circumscribe the arena for debate and discussion within and between political parties. And if the Gujarat government’s ban on his book is allowed to prevail, it will have a chilling effect on a wide range of academic and cultural endeavours across the country.

Another excellent read, an article by Ramachandra Guha: The Absent Celebrant. Both the articles are somewhat related, I feel and I will leave it up to the readers to figure out the nuances. And I, for now, just want to mull over this:

Gandhi said he did not get time to read newspapers; in any case, he commented, "What does it matter, who talks in my favour or against me, if I myself am sound at bottom?"

So true and I wonder if that secured feeling comes that easy.

On a different note, I just begun reading India After Gandhi, after delaying it as much as I could because of my fear of subject, history. As a security blanket and to balance it out, I am trying to do a parallel read with Waiting for the Mahatma by R.K.Narayan (of Malgudi Days fame which I still thoroughly enjoy. Swaaaaaaaaaaami!!), for two reasons. One, its a fiction and two its a light reading.

Foiled mission

2009-08-07T22:50:00.007-07:00

Remember, I bragged, few days back? So, it turns out, I could neither keep up with the target sessions nor could I improve on it. Obviously. I have been under the weather for past few days. Longest I can remember, in this lifetime (I have realized, how much I love exaggerating!). Fever, cough, more like flu and all kind of weird related stuff with it, for about 2/3 weeks, now. In my head,, at least, I feel, I am a pretty healthy person and it hurts my ego (big time, I swear) when something like this happens and for first few days I do not even acknowledge that am not quite perfect health wise.

Anyway, this is not what I came to whine about. What I wanted to crib about was that my pound beating program has taken a beating itself and what should have been 8 lbs by now is rigidly stuck at 5 lbs. I do not like scale's stuck up behavior but as long as it doesn't move right, I will be at peace. Of course, this has to do with my MIA from gymmin' scene and what's worse is that I had slowly built the perfect regime and was religiously trying to build on it and bam! Its like somebody threw buckets of water to douse the fire and now standing on the side and laughing at the foiled plan and mission of mine. Argh!!

On the brighter side, I think, I am doing better now and ready to take on the world but I will not be bragging about it, at least for the time being! I don't want to jinx it ,again. Laugh all you can but I will believe in it till I can laugh at it myself. I will not mind all your best wishes and sympathy. So pour it all you can! I am gonna gym my a** off now~

As Woolf said: Arrange whatever pieces come your way!

Lekin

2009-07-31T02:14:00.006-07:00

Lekin songs were classic. Still are! Lyrics by Gulzar and music by Hridaynath Mangeshkar. And this one, shines through them. I find it very powerful because of the lyrics.

Suniyo ji.mp3

So much...

2009-07-23T22:04:00.005-07:00

for being an IITian, huh? While, I have nothing against premier institutes but I do have a problem of them being classified as an elitist group of intellectuals. That is such a gross mistake. I have seen couple of miserable failures of personalities of folks who attended "premier institutes" all their lives and proved themselves as "premier failures" and pseudo intellectuals too. One such example: IIT engineer is online sex stalker in US. On the other hand, I have also found guys from not-so-premier-institutes as great thinkers and absolutely humble intellectuals. So, I wonder, what makes things premier the way we project or are fed in our minds as?

There are couple of points that I would like to state in which first one I have a strong problem with and second one is just a deeper problem I see:

Classifying education into lower/upper rungs and feed this in mind of students who attend and leading that to idolizing and making them believe that they are indeed some superior lot. Isn't that a systematically adopted abuse?
Human debased base urges (as one example cited about) cannot be alienated just by these superficial tags that we generate and attach to people into inferior or superior lot of human beings, no?

A Woman in Berlin

2009-07-17T23:19:00.005-07:00

After reading several personal accounts of victims and wading through innumerable real stories, one fact becomes more clear to me that they never forget, and move on to lead a normal life. One such story of broken silence about collectivized systematic heinousness, here, in, A Woman in Berlin. Few quotes from the article to think deeply about:

"I was immediately gang raped by five Russians. The memories come back to you over and over again; you can never forget something like that. Sometimes after I talk about it, I sleep for a few hours and then wake up crying, screaming. You can never ever forget," she says.

As a result, for many women, political fear and shame — mixed with guilt about Nazi atrocities — created a kind of code of silence.

"The raping continues. They are everywhere, in every home. We service the Russians now. And we women will have to keep silent. Or no man will ever want to touch us again. Wretched Germany!" she says in one scene.

"The study has been helpful. But of course it brought back everything. And I've had a lot of sleepless nights because of it," she says.

...

2009-07-13T20:47:00.005-07:00

Given that I am such a stuck-up person when it comes to welcoming new music, I was taken aback to my response to movie, Love Aaj Kal songs. A friend delivered the entire album to my inbox and I had not heard of the movie name yet. So, that was the beginning of my trouble. Looking at the name of the movie and my disapproval for the title of the movie, I did not even venture into downloading the songs. After couple of days, I just did it with very low enthusiasm as I had my biases already formed based on the casual title, "Love aaj Kal." I had said to myself, "what good can it be" and had dismissed it. Well, I have been proved wrong. There are few very groovy songs in this album. The best one is Chor Bazaari in the album, for me (by a fair margin). Its so very nice. Second one is Ajj Din Chadheya (but only first 20/25 seconds of it) and third one is Dooriyan. I have changed my mind on this album so many times that it has shaken my confidence. I hope, I don't come back with updates and edits later. Who would trust a person who likes and dissects songs to like and dislike for chosen few seconds in it?

Sigh! Life can be complicated with complex choices to discern from.

Expulsion for them

2009-07-10T22:02:00.004-07:00

Since, they are HIV+, parents of non-HIV positive kids are demanding expulsion for the fear of infection. This fear is of getting infected, just being in the proximity of infection. Its not bad enough that they have been infected with the disease that they also face this community ostracism?

Since the school reopened in the second week of June, these 150 students have remained absent for fear of infection. "We fear that if our children play with HIV-positive kids, they too will contract the dreaded disease. We don't want our students to continue their education in this school."

To further pressure the zilla parishad administration into expelling the students, the villagers at a well-attended meeting unanimously passed a resolution to withdraw their children from school if the HIV-positive students were not expelled.

Four gone...

2009-07-05T02:35:00.005-07:00

..and eight more to go. Yes, you might have guessed it right. Those numbers have to do something with pounds and you can attach "desirable personal loss" to it, as well. After much dodging and bluffing, I am back to my routine visits to gym. It's been a month and I am lovin' it, seeing the visible results, beyond the mental satisfaction of following a good habit.

On an average, its 4 visits per week, when sanity prevails over lethargy and laziness. So far, its only one week that I am ashamed of, for absconding for one full-whole-complete-all seven days -week bunking. Weight of one week guilt will result in more rigorous weeks to come, so it all works out fine, you see. Or so I say and think to self.

Work-out looks something like this at the moment and I am determined to improve upon it, in next few weeks: 2.5/3.0 miles of walk/run, followed by 3.5/4.0 miles of cycling, 15/20 minutes of rowing and stepping exercises and to finish, end it with half hour of yoga (combination of 8 to 10 moderate to difficult postures).

I made a little wish in a big park

2009-06-25T08:01:00.007-07:00

Postcards

Courtesy: Blank Noise
---
And what with all the politicians these days?! "Each one, has one," is the motto they seem to be following. It's like a *thing* nowadays.

Consent makes it right?

2009-06-15T22:03:00.010-07:00

So, its not yet confirmed that, if the actor really raped a minor maid or if it was with consent. Let's say there was a consent (for a minute), does that not make it wrong anyway for a married man to have sexual activity with a minor while his wife and kid were away? Or is it that consent provides a license to muck around? Although wife is pleading her actor husband's innocence. I innocently wonder why? What is she trying to save and what is left in that marriage?

In a country, where news gets more attention because of Bollywood affiliation and where Bollywood tag equals fame and expertise to speak and endorse on every subject, from politics to sports and everything in between. Or else why is Mahesh Bhatt's comment given any heed?

Bhatt said "my sources in the police say that he has confessed to sex with consent."

Update (June 30th, 09): Ahuja's lawyer said, "Ahuja's bail application mentions few main grounds as: He has no criminal antecedents, he is from a good family, the trial could take long time which may affect his unfinished films."

Is it only me, who finds this as load of impudent swill?

Update (July 9th, 09): "The court on Wednesday rejected actor Shiney Ahuja's bail petition in rape case. Ahuja is in judicial custody for allegedly raping his teenaged domestic maid."
Tough luck, Bollywood world. Ha!

Where should we be living?

2009-06-11T20:53:00.001-07:00

She made her decision known, quietly, confidently and with little doubt. I heard it all and I was aware of her analysis that had gone behind making that strong statement. I was neither surprised nor shocked. It was not an enlightenment but a reaffirmation of those feelings which as an Indian girl we all have tucked just below our throats which we all bring it up with little goading. It’s that uncomfortable truth which some of us had a chance to escape while others have submitted to with silent resignation.

My friend, whom I met after couple of years and within few minutes of giggling and reminiscing of old graduate school days, mentioned in a subtle serious tone, that as a mature girl, she would not want to spend her youth years in any Indian city. Not by choice, at least!

She, who has traveled a many countries and had a chance to live in few other countries other than India. I was sure, she wasn't referring to materialistic pleasures, financial security or anything that we might label as developed countries privileges. She was talking about the freedom to breathe as a human being minus the constant reminder that she is one of those with only X-chromosomes constriction which comes with life of constant battle with social fabric and its tailored suffocation. To cut and sew to adapt when there are those leering threats, maneuvering of paths to avoid being touched or groped or just whistling which has perfection of melodious pitch and cat-calling comparison to Bollywood goddesses. Which Indian girl is not familiar with naughty remarks, "Arre dekh Kareena ja rahi hai," or "yeh dekh Sushmita Sen aa rahi hai be?" Humiliation which makes her yearn to run and abandon the public spaces. This disrespect to Indian women reminds me of respect Indians give to their traffic lights and regulations, it's just like given (or actually not) to objects which deserve no recognition or respect.

She was talking about security of walking on the streets and public transit without a reminder that she is only at the mercy of chosen respect by men. She was talking about safety in public places and not just from physical threats and freedom to work late at nights because she can have a deadline too. She was talking about the life in which where you do not become comfortable just only adjusting and adapting because the men have rotten minds. She was talking about normalcy of doing things, the way she wants and any time of the day, any place she wanted without any humiliation that comes as a package deal in her lovable country. Love to the country which is like love for your parents with whom you disagree completely in ideologies but yearn for them because you belong to them.

I wish her luck for her decisions and I wish the same things for me too. Sigh!

Mussarat Abbas

2009-06-03T08:08:00.003-07:00

I discovered Abbas's voice while browsing, looking for Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan songs. He is talented and it does not take much time to recognize it. He sings Nusrat's songs mainly and rightfully so, since his voice and range matches to Ustad's Sufi genre quite a bit. There is passion in his voice and he uses this talent very adeptly in variation he brings out in different pitches. He sang two of my favorite songs on Sa Re Ga Ma show and I was pleasantly surprised and satisfied thoroughly. Just wished for cleaner versions of these two, without much drama from judges panel that happens on these shows, you know what I mean. Here you go...

First one is "Tere bina nahin lagda" below and Mussarat's version, here.

UDDIKAAN- TERE BIN...

Second one is Sanwre tore bina from the movie Bandit queen and Mussarat's version is here.

Trauma of parents...

2009-05-30T20:07:00.005-07:00

...who are rich and famous! The Indian ghazal duo which made their mark with some of their most beautiful collection of ghazals. Jagjit Singh and Chitra Singh, whose mellifluous voices I grew up listening to.

Chitra Singh's daughter committed suicide, y'day, who was suffering from clinical depression over two failed marriages.

And that's not all!

Their son, Vivek Singh, died at a young age of 19, in a road accident, in 90s. That was the event, when Chitra Singh decided to quit singing over this humungous personal loss.

Nothing can fill this void in their life now, and no money or fame will help them get past this grief to lead a normal life, any time soon.

Kiya hai Pyar Jise...

Where would my grave be?

2009-05-26T02:03:00.014-07:00

I better find out, answer to this question after I deride this peanut-size brained, self-proclaimed, fearless leader of Mumbai land which belongs to Marathi folks, only. As a side note, in middle of nowhere, in the post, I would like my grave to be in a place heavily populated by Maharashtrians spot in Mumbai or in front of Balasaheb's plush mansion. Apart from abundant laughable ridiculosity, there are many noteworthy remarks made in this proclamation by Balasahebji Thackeray.

Thackeray calls Singh and Nirupam a snake and a cobra respectively, and warns them for acting against the interests of Marathi people.

Thackeray continues: "Delhi always fear that Marathis will become rulers one day.

Sonia Gandhi said that Mumbai belongs to everyone. Who has given her the right to decide Mumbai's fate? In fact, she is an outsider to the country.

I call them masterpieces of wisdom meant for framing and putting them up as wall decors. You noticed the "ji" in there? What do I say, I have utmost respect for this clown clan who has worked really hard on divisive India. I wonder, if nation should get together to dig his and his son's grave first before tackling more constructive developmental work. It might just help speed up the process.

Ha!

Serendipity...

2009-05-18T19:31:00.002-07:00

...in Singapore, of finding that getting caught unaware in rains still leaves a tickle, I still love getting drenched in rains. Realized, some simple pleasures never get buried too deep, no matter how jaded life gets! Simple pleasure will be simply found just like this oldie song. I love the way she cuts him off, every time, to say what she wants to say, nevertheless. Ahhh...!!

Tumse Mila Tha Pya...

The ugliness of the Indian male

2009-05-16T12:25:00.007-07:00

I had first read on Hari's blog, a forthright confirmation about atypical habits which are typical to genre of Indian males. It was a nudge to my deeper observations which I had conveniently never made a fuss about, never mind if they had made me uncomfortable. And then, about a week back, on South Asian literature mailing list (which goes by SASIALIT) there was a furor over an article by same Mukul Kesavan, The Ugly Indian Man - Of hygiene, hair and horrible habits. Needless to say, there were some angry email exchange by Indian men and the rebel was quite evident. Rightfully and quite understandably so. Many of them were offended and there were voices of rebel to discontinue the discussion. One gentleman also said,

"As an Indian male I am deeply offended at this kind of hate-mongering.
Indianmaleophobia is what it is. Moderators, over here, if you please!"

Recently, I was on a flight to Singapore, 18-long hours flight which I had dreaded from the beginning. But Singapore airlines had me impressed right from the beginning with their hospitality, provision of comfort and attention to little details. I think, the food was a little excessive for me and I could barely eat one-fourth of what they provided but after a couple of times, I realized it would just be safer for me to decline rest of the meals and snacks, until I felt hungry again. However, after 12 hours of flight there was a stop for fueling at Incheon, a place I had never heard of before. But this 40 minutes pit-stop led to shuffling of passengers. After I returned, I had an Indian male neighbor for my remaining 6 hours leg. What the heck did I know, what a replacement this would turn out to be.

This person was probably in his late 30s or early 40s, slightly pudgy with salt and pepper hair. His casualness was noticeable. He had flung his shoes aside as soon as he had plonked in to seat, tore open the blanket plastic cover with a sense of immediacy and covered himself as he reclined casually stretching his legs under his front seat. He grabbed the remote device immediately and fiddled with it until he settled down for the movie of his choice. Quite understandable that utmost comfort can be critical on journeys like these.

Within few minutes into the movie, with remote in his one hand, this man was industriously digging into his nose, alternating between left and right nostrils. My red flag antenna was on high alert from then on. After all, I had written confirmations and self observations to back my aghast internal (so far) reaction. I knew that this hard work of index finger is a danger in my vicinity.

"When you think of where they put those nails, this is not surprising. I’ve seen respectable men conducting conversations with their index fingers two digits deep in their nostrils, digging with industrial enthusiasm. If you ever see a desi man delicately rubbing the tip of his index over the pad of his thumb, beware. Don’t do near him: he’s rolling the bogies he’s mined into little balls."

This called for my pretentious patient demeanor to react and soon. So I did! I gave him some serious angry looks but I should have known that the man is too comfortable and oblivious to his surroundings. I was suddenly very conscious of my lack of access to freedom in that belted seat. I was helpless and trepid of my confinement. I immediately mumbled, "this is disgusting"! I was gleeful that he heard. But he did not stop right away, his fingers would reach out to nose and then he would brush it off gently with his thumb and index finger and end it with a sniff. I did not give up and obviously could not sleep for rest of my journey. I calculated in my head that uncomfortable alert wakefulness is a safer proposition than oblivious sleep which can lead to infliction of dreadful habits of Indian male neighbor.

Hello from Singapore!

Mediocrity

2009-05-13T07:23:00.008-07:00

How do we justify mediocrity? Process of learning, acceptable sub-standard way of thinking, rejection to first-handed way of subliminal possibilities and thinking, wholehearted acceptance to below average ways?

Can manipulation be labeled mediocre? Does explicitness of shameless mediocre actions qualify for better preparedness or implicit-but-can-be-spotted-mediocre actions qualify for sophisticated way to some esoteric elitism?

Mediocrity is a dangerous premise and I have seen it very closely in known and somewhat known faces. Close enough to know that it is mediocre thinking which has translated into mediocre actions. I have experienced this in professional environment, volunteer work (seemingly noblest intentions), personal life, friends and acquaintances. It's stealthy presence leaves me troubled, every time. People being comfortable with mediocrity makes me uncomfortable. It makes me nervous, so very nervous!

If, anytime, you hear somebody saying in callous demeanor, "but that is how it has been happening for a long time," watch out for degraded collective wisdom in calling to accept and refusal to think!

...

2009-05-10T23:35:00.005-07:00

Jaage Hain.mp3

"aadhe adhoore khwaab jo,

poore na ho sake,

ikbar fir se neend mein,

woh khwaab hone do."

Beautiful song with beautiful lyrics! This is not to say, that, I have forgotten about my most(est) favorite gem. But this just fits my current mood just a little better.

Watch it...

2009-05-06T23:26:00.006-07:00

...it's a bitchy rant!

I got super annoyed with this. I don't follow it but stumbled a few days back and couldn't resist making my point. If you wonder why, read the rest. I don't dislike things without a reason. Firstly, I have no idea why nowadays every possible celebrity wants to join this bandwagon of blogs. You really don't have to! It's not uncool if you don't have a blog. But it's uncool if you present garbage which is loud and desperate for attention. Quite like the way he always liked hogging all the attention, AB, and is his name. Didn't you get enough attention already Mr.B, from the nation which featured you in its poverty parade of recent times as well? I am referring to Slumdog Millionaire. If I were you, I would be ashamed than anything else of the fact that a kid did what he did in the movie for your picture. It's rather a sad symbolism of deprived existence and presented in layers of fantasies and promises, through the lens of Bollywood. But that's not your fault entirely.

Forget your acting skills for now, and let's just analyze your blog quality bit by bit, disaster by disaster, feature by feature. One, do you really think people need to look at your loud close-up picture first and be forced to scroll up & down to hunt for some meaningful content? Flicking your father's poem to decorate it on your blog is in cheap taste, imho, because such things can be done and should be on a personal website, no? Then comes the content part, do you really think its important to have an everyday log? who reads that kind of royal shit? As a mature adult, you can contribute meaningfully or just be quiet. It's about time you figured that its about quality and not about quantity. I quickly glanced through and couldn't figure out anything that made any sense. You hog everything that came your way, whether it was acting, singing, anchoring, clowning. There was no thinking time, sifting time given and it showed in everything you did.

Nation got tired of you but you haven't tired yourself of giving garbage to the nation. For the little good work we can talk about, here is what I have to say. If you worked on million things, chances of one, two or three being somewhat successful is highly likely.

Be good and Keep the promise of appreciating sanity!

Effective efforts

2009-05-03T07:26:00.008-07:00

I had written this, below email (last year) to set of people, of my impression (as a woman) and categorization of various potential heinous things that women may face in their life.

Hi A,

Thanks for putting this together! You have captured the essential purpose of this conference session and intention with it was triggered to begin with. If you notice, there are just so many issues of varied seriousness, be it regular day to today life instances, to trivial matter like using guys instead of folks, or more grave issues of molestations to rape. And since the session did not come out with tangible concrete action items to go home with, it cannot be labeled as faulty. Issue by itself is so diverse and knotty that we do need to focus on problem by problem from accepting if its a problem first to if there are healing steps required. But with due respect to everyone's consciousness, we do need to focus first on absolutely necessary harmful issues which are beyond the "gotcha" aha moments.

One such discussion I had with V (during conference) on existence of prostitution business in our "society." When people say existence of flesh business is acceptable for safer societies for women. So essentially are we sacrificing few women for greater common good? Is that something they are doing willingly? Is it the money lure (blinding by not providing the choice of other alternatives)? If it is a healthy component to the society then why it is not a mainstream profession and why not advocated to every woman. My gut feeling is no woman will or doing this by choice. Its either force, trick or difficult financial circumstances. Hence, I do not agree with that argument at all. highest degree...

Next is molestation, rape where affected women are damaged beyond inexplicable impacts. Even though for a moment we accept that we make it socially acceptable and men are more open towards accepting the victims, but are they not scarred and battered at a deeper level? Almost all the stories that we heard in the email, there was one element very common, shame, guilt, deep hurt (even though none of them asked for it). None were rape experiences in those but any kind of physical intrusion left them seriously hurt. How did the guilt get formed to girl child of age as early as 7/8 years old. Is it instinct or? higher degree...

Next is cat-calling or eve-teasing etc..these are instances where women are affected at a more superficial level and their physical self is not intruded by strangers. I got talking to my American friends here about this issues and idea of eve-teasing is almost non-existent. It will be interesting to find why it is such a big crisis in India.Is it suppression of guys feelings, upbringing, lack of proper education, lack of co-eds, sex education? These might be bit easier to deal with. I know, I am making a big assumption here. Please chime in. Medium level...

Next is issues related to our everyday lives, why were women made to learn cooking and guys taught not to cry etc...list is long here. But having said this, these are deep rooted, well fed from childhood practices/biases etc. How harmful can they be or are? Once we assess that we can address those as they come. Low level...

Some of you may feel that one is more harmful than the other. Agreed. This is very subjective. I merely listed all these for convenience and since we cannot adopt the same approach to all the problems. But we need to identify the gravity of issue individually and tackle one at a time. I think we have been pretty successful in introducing the topic in general. Now we need to find our focus and work towards one problem at a time.

My 2 cents.
Pallavi

Today, morning I read about this.

According to the Justice Department, 1 in 3 Native American women will be raped in her lifetime. Tribal leaders say predators believe Native American land is almost a free-for-all, where no law enforcement can touch them.

It got me wondering if just tightening the federal efforts is the solution to eradicate this problem.

The federal government has recently announced plans to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to improve medical clinics, buy more rape kits and bolster the police response to what authorities say is an epidemic of rapes on Indian land.

I personally don't think so! It will empower women and grant access to justice but they seem like prescriptive reactionary steps after the deed is done. What prescriptive steps are we formulating where physical assaults do not even occur in perpetrator's mind? What can we introduce in our formal or informal education or methods of social interactions that aggressive mindset is dealt with, to avoid destructive attacks, altogether?

We met...

2009-04-28T23:33:00.010-07:00

(jab)...no, it was Jab we met. Either way you look at it. They met, they were chasing different things in that same moment of time. But meeting was just a customary assurance. One had realized faster than the other. Until they both realize the same thing, at the same time, they were on some circuitous path. But in this timeless land, time was just a matter of time for them. Isn't it? And if everything had to happen on time then chance would not get to have its fun.

Such was the theme of movie Jab we met. I was pleasantly surprised by this movie, by its simplicity and Kareena's acting. It was a treat! She, sometimes really does such a remarkable job. I felt the same about her talent as an actress in the movie, Omkara.

I like this song from We met jab, not really, it's Jab we met. Beautiful lyrics, sung by Ustad Rashid Khan rendered with his soothing voice.

Aaoge Jab Tum.mp3

I like this song too from the movie, Tum se hi, sung by Mohit Chauhan of Silk Route fame. That reminds me of another really really wonderful song called humsafar by them. Shoot! Now, I am fully distracted!..:)

...

2009-04-23T16:36:00.008-07:00

I am a little short on time hence a filler (like) post on various quotes that I stumbled on, in past few days. I find them quite powerful or interesting, so sharing it here.

These, I stumbled on while reading through the history of feminist movement:

This is no simple reform. It really is a revolution. Sex and race because they are easy and visible differences have been the primary ways of organizing human beings into superior and inferior groups and into the cheap labour in which this system still depends. We are talking about a society in which there will be no roles other than those chosen or those earned. We are really talking about humanism. ~ Gloria Steinem

We know that we can do what men can do, but we still don't know that men can do what women can do. That's absolutely crucial. We can't go on doing two jobs. ~ Gloria Steinem
( I like this one for her passive humorous tone)

But the problem is that when I go around and speak on campuses, I still don't get young men standing up and saying, 'How can I combine career and family? ~ Gloria Steinem

Isn't that the problem? That women have been swindled for centuries into substituting adornment for love, fashion (as it were) for passion? ~Erica Jong

Many beautiful women have been made happy by their own beauty, but no intelligent woman has ever been made happy by her own intelligence. ~Mignon McLaughlin

If all men are born free, how is it that all women are born slaves? ~Mary Astell

Some of us are becoming the men we wanted to marry. ~Gloria Steinem

*******

And these are plain wise words from a man I truly admire, Barack Obama:

Focusing your life solely on making a buck shows a poverty of ambition. It asks too little of yourself. And it will leave you unfulfilled.

It's only when you hitch your wagon to something larger than yourself that you will realize your true potential.

If we aren't willing to pay a price for our values, then we should ask ourselves whether we truly believe in them at all.

We need to steer clear of this poverty of ambition, where people want to drive fancy cars and wear nice clothes and live in nice apartments but don't want to work hard to accomplish these things. Everyone should try to realize their full potential.

I have seen, the desperation and disorder of the powerless.

Today we are engaged in a deadly global struggle for those who would intimidate, torture, and murder people for exercising the most basic freedoms. If we are to win this struggle and spread those freedoms, we must keep our own moral compass pointed in a true direction.
~ Barack Obama

A trial...

2009-04-07T21:41:00.005-07:00

...which the world is watching! Trial of a doctor but who happened to be a human rights activist too! Trial that is going on, now for 22 long months. Trial which is not seeing any ray of hope. A trial that does not qualify this doctor to get bail because he is such a serious threat to the nation because he worked for the tribal communities which should never really qualify for basic rights, resources, or health care. Trial in a nation which reserves bails & justice for only stars like Sanjay Dutt and the likes. Trial which likes to ignore the worldwide recognition or the plea from Nobel laureates. A trial that has risen above all this to protect the nation from a threat of its kind from this doctor! Rightfully so!

A trial of its kind which does not want to know that his health is deteriorating!

Sen’s condition is deteriorating. His heart is not doing too well. He is hypertensive and suffering from an untreated prostrate ailment, needing medical care. He has asked the court several times to permit him private care at his own expense. The court will not grant it. Sen said to the judge, “Sir, my condition is deteriorating. I could suffer a heart attack any moment.” The judge was not moved. On the other hand, the police are making every attempt to make things difficult by restricting Sen’s visiting rights. Save family, no one is allowed to meet him. There is no procedure in the jail manual or Prisons Act which allows this. But it is still being done. The might of the state prevails.

Hope the trial wakes up before it's too late to avoid the load of mockery of failed judicial system of a nation which harps for its democracy. Till then people will raise their voice in every possible way!

Crazy love or crazy denial...

2009-03-31T17:29:00.003-07:00

...of a woman? I think, women are so eager to believe and feel that they are in this perfect heavenly love that they take a long time to accept that they are actually in a physically or emotionally abusive relationship. Leslie Morgan Steiner talks about her true story. "He worshipped me and denigrated me at the same time," she explains.

Full story here. Do listen to her here.

She is...

2009-03-14T11:05:00.005-07:00

(Pre script: It’s no secret or a surprise anymore that I am a feminist, so here we go…)

Post contd…

...a tramp, bimbette, bimbo, harlot, strumpet, slut, play girl, call girl, hooker, moll, streetwalker, bar girl, stripper, tart, camp follower, bawd, scarlet woman, courtesan, strumpet. She is called by all these names because a woman whose birth goal was only to satiate swinging levels of desires of men from time to time. Some eye-candy “pleasures”, some physical “pleasures” and pleasures all the way. Hell, has she been objectified for libido blame transfer?! (Do we have such an elaborate adjectives listing for men?)

So who is a tramp or a slut or a tart or pick any adornment from above list that is given by not-so-fair sex? Any woman who has big breasts or just breasts? Any woman who has perfect hour-glass body or just nice cleavage or nice shaped legs to pierce your gaze into? What is it, really? No seriously, I ask? List is endless and the guy would want to do her desperately with mighty desperation but such a slut does not qualify for respect or marriage or respectful relationship. If she does not consent to play any role of choice then just fuck the shit out of her and rape her, right??

OK…what triggered my blood to boil and anger to seethe so much so that I had to make my point and not so subtly this time? I heard a conversation of TV/movie junkies and one said, “Bay Watch, Ooooooh yeah!!! Pamela Anderson is a kind of girl I would want to do…you know…but she is not the kind of girl whom you take to your mom.” I sat there, heard, as my fist tightened, eyes widened and I breathed heavily through my nose in anger. I gulped my frustration over this since I have decided not to be aggressive on every instance!

So what is it with this hypocrisy? Because no one sees it or no one says it or it’s just not even worth mentioning for this second rate citizenry of humanity? Was she born only for first rate citizens to fit into any role that he may wish for? Sometimes a slut, a stripper and on different scenarios, a good girl who can be a wife, a mother or mother of his kids? All various existences desired should be mutually exclusive and shall not be combined under any circumstances. Her roles are pre-defined and her destiny is the deciding factor which bucket she will fall in to. Mind you, she does not have a choice of her own but merely an option to choose from.

I have not understood the stigma that women have to carry in providing sex- services either by consent or force, when the stigmatization essentially should be borne by men which is driven by their desires, right? Think about it, tomorrow, guys who go to women for sex are called prostitutes, or those who go to see flesh for friendly banter are called strippers, or guys who ogle at hot chicks are called tramps.

Sigh!!

Rahman...

2009-03-01T11:14:00.002-07:00

...wins Oscar for Slumdog Millionaire which wasn't his best work but he truly deserves all the recognition. This and much much more with the talent he has swept Indian music for over a decade now. Such brilliance! classy to say the least...

Have been trying to like Dilli 6 music. Again not his best...but I loved this one....wow!!

07 - Genda Phool -...

Sensation to get poverty noticed...

2009-02-26T17:33:00.009-07:00

So Hollywood fame has become the stepping stone for reality to hit home? Slumdog Millionaire and all the hype around it, gets me wondering if sensation is essential to accept grim realities? Lot of things depicted in the movie are exactly how things are in Mumbai slums. But I had trouble accepting that children who go through such atrocities of maiming, child labor, dismal proverty or prostitution ever end up being so hopeful and cheerful in life and almost none had a broken spirit. Overall the movie was nice but at the end, I cringed about misrepresentation through sensationalization of poverty and the related misfortune that comes along with it. Watch The Reader and you would come back awestruck and shaken about everything in it. Absolutely stunning movie!

Anyway, read this:

Azharuddin Mohammed Ismail, 10, and Rubina Ali Qureshi, nine, who play the lead characters in their younger years, currently live in shacks in the Garib Nagar slum in Bandra East, Mumbai. But Amarjit Singh Manhas, the chairman of the Maharashtra housing authority, told the Times of India: "We felt that since the children have made the nation proud, they must be given free houses."

Is that really a matter of nation's pride? Because I'm not sure, if I feel that way. So all those kids who couldn't get lucky enough to feature in Slumdog Millionaire can take rest because we need Hollywood's sensation to accept and do something about gross realities of India. Don't you think , right intention to do something is as important as the right action?

Cultural corruption?

2009-02-16T15:32:00.004-07:00

Firstly, my logical brain, seriously does not understand the urgent need to have a day to express your love when you can do it all year long. Can you imagine, if you have to hold your romance for 364 days to express on 365th day. If any normal human being has to contain so much love & affection that we have around for only one day, I, for sure will implode if not allowed to explode. Jokes apart...

So, the self-appointed moral police threatened (and then got arrested) everyone who wished to celebrate v-day. They call this celebration un-Indian, uncouth, uncivilized. Agreed! I so agree...

So, what is being culturally civilized Indian entail? This, this or this?

I want to know the answer because I do want to continue to be an Indian.

I ask, where is the moral police where all this is happening.?!?! I think they are smart enough to know, where the popularity gain is! They too are media hungry and Indian media surely fulfills that greed.

Shook it up...

2009-02-10T20:19:00.004-07:00

"Fidelity": Don't Divorce... from Courage Campaign on Vimeo.

Tell the Supreme Court to invalidate Prop 8.

Were you abused?

2009-02-04T19:40:00.011-07:00

At the risk of being labeled a crusader of feminism, I will explain why it is important to express, if you experienced, faced, witnessed or were a silent observer of any form of abuse to womankind. Abuse is not just physical or claims more damage but even seemingly passive abuse (I will explain this later in the post) is equally harmful. I am willing to share real life examples if need be.

Several months back, I was asked to share a personal story about my experience of any kind of abuse that I faced, as a girl. The email was sent to a close group of women (volunteers) under a cover of complete trust. Email sat quietly for 2 days begging for a response. But then, there was one response, and then the second one and by third one it dawned to me that it was not something that happened to me only, which I had completely forgotten under the cloud of shame and guilt. And that was the beginning of my self-chosen suppression, as a tiny girl, as early as being a seven years old child, without even knowing what it was. Each woman in the group had a horrid & a heartbreaking story and perpetrators were sometimes strangers but a lot of times family members, uncle, cousin, brother, husband, boyfriend & fiance'. This fact is not so important but it highlights one point, that it is everywhere and can happen to anyone by anyone.

What did this exercise do to me?

It strongly reaffirmed my faith that it is important to speak up, share and form a trusted network of people and bring out these horrifying examples to awareness, beyond a complicated burden of social pressure. I realized that there are far more basic rights to acknowledge & protect, before we go on for fancier issues. We love to dwell in popular issues and causes. Big names & popularity attracts human psyche.

I personally know a girl who even after discovering that her fiance was cheating in a relationship and had several physical relationships outside their promise, ended up marrying the guy. My guess is that the monumental pressure of society to break the engagement and speak loudly about the cheating was too big a burden. Society does not provide a very stable system to deal with such adept disrespectful behavior. Instead, we facilitate such deplorable examples with silence, indifference or its "not my problem" attitude. How many people can really do this?

I will keep my promise to explain passive abuse. We all accept that rape, gang rape, sexual assault etc. can be very damaging to a woman. Affected women are devastated and damages are more or less irreversible. But so are other forms of abuses. Groping, feeling, touching, flashing, staring, and stalking etc. can also form a sense of inadequacy and shame.

The other day I was in a deep discussion with a set of my friends and it started with Mumbai attacks, went on to economy and then ended up on physical abuse. As I started giving examples, the girl in a group announced that if I ever have a daughter, I would never want to raise her in India and her voice went heavy and eyes welled up. She recounted her own childhood story and then another friend's. It clearly means that none of us can ever forget, no matter how many years pass by and where we go and we are emotionally battered for rest of our lives. The guys to my surprise, always get surprised when they hear such revelations. His angry tone suggested that he thought of it as extremely unfair and he suggested that why do women not talk about these things more openly and form a stronger support group. I said such efforts are everywhere, its a matter of proactively joining hands and to make it more successful.

Coming back to passive abuse, anything that causes pain or hurts beyond the tangible and visible wounds are also methods of abusing. Lying, cheating, hiding facts, avoiding response, comparing, mocking, blaming, being disrespectful or infidelity of any degree can be very harmful too, it leads to emotional abuse. Since, these aspects are soft and hard to pin-point openly, it makes it even more easy for the perpetrators.

Perpetrators harbor on this weakness that the victim will never openly speak-up and they use this fact to their advantage. This makes it all the more critical that more victims acknowledge and speak-up and grow this network strong and stronger. child-abuse is a good example of this.

We are so intricately and organically connected to each other and the issues that we simply cannot work with the mindset that "oh but it doesn't affect me so it's not my problem." Injustice anywhere is injustice everywhere and explicitly or implicitly it will make itself clear. So our isolated "just" presence can be temporarily soothing and can make us short-sighted & prevent us from looking at things more holistically, beyond the "I" zone.

With all that said, I hope none of us will suppress the wrong under the garb of guilt and shame in future. Don't go silent and accept it as your destiny because you were born as a girl.

I will sign off with something Ms.Roy said:

To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never, to forget. ~Arundhati Roy

Rozaana......

2009-01-31T23:42:00.007-07:00

Rozaana..I like..do not particularly dig the start of the song (may be it's got to do with B's voice..was never a fan of neither his acting nor his voice and never really could understand the hype about him. No, seriously!)..but as it picks the pace...love the lyrics...it forms a great song for my runnin'...[which I have been royally ignoring...(sheepish grin)...] collection!

Rozaana - Nishabd ...

Big guys...

2009-01-29T15:23:00.024-07:00

Gandhi, Tagore, Ambedkar argued..

"that it is our capacity to be moral that allows us to constitute ourselves as a people and nation.The purpose of democracy is to widen the scope of virtue in the public realm. A modern corporate, however ethical, is not a civilisation whose objective is to allow each person to elevate moral life."

But what the heck did they know....Narendra Modi is on the roll (& [in]sane peeps keep nagging him) and that is why we love him..and can never get enough of him.

Because after all, we don't like barbaric killing to soothe our conscience and it's too much on your face kind, you know but soft killing and sleek corporate cleaning of tribal and farmers is acceptable, since they constitute waste anyway and form stigmatic presence to our modernity. Yes, I love to be modern!

P.S.: Something terribly wrong with my blog formatting setting. Help is welcome or else hold your peace till I figure it out!

AIDS Sutra: Dark side of the night

2009-01-23T19:10:00.010-07:00

Array of emotions race through piecing together vignettes of untold stories of nights filled with wretched desire, power, ostracized and suppressed emotions and a glimpse of fractures of alienated society. Some familiar, some eye-opening but mostly unacknowledged stealthy existence as we hear about AIDS epidemic, moving as swiftly as the speed we are diluting our value-system. Each voice in stories carries a resigned acceptance through broken spirit and sends a reminder of societal follies and failures we have chosen with arrogance of ignorance. AIDS Sutra, Untold Stories from India carries deadweight of all this and much more from isolated world of “India Shining” development.

Human dominance over nature, technological breakthroughs and other human beings has been a running theme over generations. Slavery is a direct consequence of it and so is thriving prostitution and coerced sex industry. With time, hierarchical power structure has exchanged role with monetary power. Hence Devdasis have been renamed as sex workers/prostitutes or something fancier I am not even aware of. I see AIDS epidemic as merely a consequence of something deep rooted in a pretentious model of precarious civilized society. Spread of HIV is directly linked to one of most persistent propensities (but widely undermined and lacking explicit acceptance) of repressed egos of human beings-sex.

Snippet from introduction of the book, “There were about a dozen women there, wearing their best saris, gold necklaces, flowers in their hair and bindis on their foreheads.” “This group of women had all been ostracized by their families and neighbors. One woman had hoped to keep her work a secret from her husband and children. But when word got out, her daughter was disowned by her friends. The girl was so distraught that she committed suicide.”

As I see from “society” perspective on flesh business, we cannot live without your existence but we cannot accept your presence of services you provide. Such is the dogmatic hypocrisy we have become comfortably numb with. Calling it shamelessness would be too harsh because after all, women are born to titillate the libido senses with good looks before they surrender their body.

Amartya Sen points out in his foreword of this anthology, “ since epistemology is so central to a well founded ethics- to informed reflections on the social and political commitments that the calamity inescapably demands. If we move from depiction to perception and from reflection to compassion and resolution, all this happens, as in good literature, without self-conscious effort. This is a huge achievement.”

Kamathipura (Mumbai), Sonagachhi (Kolkata), Peddapuram (Andhra Pradesh) are all different hues of the same pale shade of diseased poverty. And contemporary authors like Kiran Desai, Salman Rushdie, Sonia Faleiro, Siddharth Deb and many more have traveled, heard, experienced the dejected side of dark & small rooms and prettied/decorated faces to bring out pulsating and deeply moving stories.

Few snippets from the stories:

We are famous because we are the descendants of courtesans and royalty, so we have that poise, those fine looks,’ the Kalavanthalu women say. No special tricks? No Tricks. We are known for our good manners. We treat a man like a king. We’;; cook non veg, we’ll give oil massages and baths. We turn on the fan. The men bring the whiskey, the McDougal’s-but everything else we provide, and when they leave we beg, Don’t go, please don’t, oh, don’t go, oh..’ we do all of that play acting. We spoil them.

Night Claims the Godavari- Kiran Desai

It’s worth emphasizing the way prostitute was regarded at the time, and indeed in ancient India. If a woman was beautiful and talented; if she could sing, dance or converse intelligently, why should she waste her skills on one man alone? Why shouldn’t a number of men enjoy her company? That is why a prostitute was called barnari or barangana- meaning public woman.

Return to Sonagachhi- Sunil Gangopadhyay

Of course, there are times when there is pleasure,’ said Rani Bai. Who does not like to make love? A handsome young man, one is gentle..’ She paused for a moment, looking out over the lake, smiling to herself. Then her face clouded over: ‘But mostly it is horrible. The farmers here, they are not like the boys of Bombay.’ And eight of them every day,’ said her friend Kaveri. ‘Sometimes ten. Unknown people. What kind of life is that?’ ‘We have a song,’ said Rani. ‘Everyone sleeps with us, but no one marries us. Many embrace us, but no one protects.’

The Daughters of Yellamma- William Dalrymple

Allow me to shake your faith...

2009-01-16T17:46:00.006-07:00

She says and she does if you happen to read Greater common good. Fight for justice, Narmada Bachao Andolan, which has made to become symbolically a solemn farce for decades in name of developmental jargon promises to millions who get affected. I will leave the rest but couple of things as Roy puts it, are worth reiterating ...

Misinformed Emotionalism is about our presumptuous paradigm for development that it's based on inherent morality. It would work perfectly, if only we were better human beings. If only we all wore khadi & suppressed our base urges- sex, shopping, dodging, spinning lessons & being unkind to the less fortunate.

Assumption of inherent morality is a very risky path, I realized it. I do not deny that few don't have it. But large numbers are driven otherwise.

Revolutionary Road ahead

2009-01-11T12:17:00.010-07:00

She surprised love. All grand serene romance, she held closely....tucked in those warm moments...some spilled out of her hands...some contained tight. Sure she was...confident not.

Snow didn't seem so white...melancholy was pristine. She shrugged off those romantic gestures a few times or so she thought.

She dived deeper in those brown eyes looking for the man she had once, ecstatically fallen for. Surprise! Conviction was missing this time, convincing could do little. She did not know, time role-played in emotional erosion, covering with those layers of not so sanctimonious gestures.

She penetrated truth, raced ahead, ran away or did she? She is at the finish line, all by herself, though. She is afraid to turn her head...his warm, amber, sparkling, sand-grains filled smile she wants to hide from.
........
Saw this movie, y'day...
Echoing similar sentiments was Revolutionary Road...a couple once fell deeply in love in a quick glance. He (Frank) settled for less, is weaker, but winds up disappointing his wife, April, who is ambitious, emotionally trapped and struggling with a man whom she wants him to be but he is not. Sensational and dramatic turmoil of human emotions for wanting to love or be loved in their own way, where, neither are sure. Not sure, Whether they are running away from the perfection of suburbia life they have or from each other. Poignant desperation leads to void attempts of exploring..explore, they do. They were not made for each other, she could not salute the fact her man is not the best self and cannot be his best self, ever.

Raj Thackeray...

2008-11-29T08:53:00.004-07:00

Shut up, shut up, SHUT UP!! If you are left with any shame and tiny bit of "Marathi madoos" blood..dont ever come out of your hiding. We have heard enough of your crappy nonsensical bull, so I think now you can take a break and may be go for some meditation or rehab center (which I think you really need) and let the real brave "Indians" take charge of nation just the way they remarkably did in controlling the terror attacks and rescuing all those valuable lives in which many were from Maharashtra too. For them they were just Indians or human beings. Get it?

Raj Thackeray, while you are at it, I mean shutting your trap process, do some good to humanity & ask Narendra Modi to shut up too, who thinks offering 1 crore rupees to brave soldiers will wash his sins.

My Mumbai mourns..

2008-11-27T11:06:00.005-07:00

yet again, as I write this! All those spots Nariman house, Oberoi's, Taj, VT station, Metro theater and Leopold's cafe where I hung out in college days. All these places and many more and my city bleeds again, screaming for justice and humanity. Mumbaikers are forced given this shock therapy that their lives are under constant menacing terror. The terror strikes are not confined to any one area, it's not just South Mumbai but has gone as far as, far suburbs of Borivali giving sense of depth & breadth of strikes.

I am sick of hearing that spirit of Mumbai will rise again within days. No, it will not! I know that Mumbai is a very lively city but it's not resilient to all that it goes through. We have to stop this farce! People of the city do not have a choice but to get up and gulp this bitter concoction (of dirty politics & religious divide) and get moving. Its not the spirit but the irony.

I was in Mumbai in 1993 and was close to one of the bomb blast locations. We were told to head back home and only after reaching home I realized the magnitude of what I had escaped. Sure, none of my family members were affected. Is that what we have to look for every time? Narrow escapes & safety for your own family and relatives? There were very valuable lives wiped out. What ensued after the blasts were horrific riots and days living in confinement of our home for many days.

And here we are, again! We are not able to recover from one and we are already into another mayhem. Every other year there is something to escape from. Haven't we maxed out with tolerance to get our voices together for peace? We cannot afford these losses anymore, can we?

Is this the event that is going to bring the political divide to unite & fight together as one nation ?

Amidst all the depressing news, Shashi Tharoor speaks bravely to sum up the sentiments of Indians.